Even knowing this and the grand plan, I feel like I get sucked in, too. It starts as “wanting to stick it to the man” by taking them up on whatever overly generous deal they feel like offering. “I know they’ll get rid of it eventually, but there’s no harm in abusing it while I can”. But any “good” company won’t just instantly quadruple their prices and sack all of their customer service staff on the spot. It’ll always start off slowly. They’ll offer promotions that are 5% less generous, they’ll start to charge bag fees or service charges. They’ll impose minimum transaction amounts. Etc.
By the time it becomes obvious, it usually too ingrained in your life, and the lives of many others to easily ditch. I saw this happen a lot with uber eats and Doordash. During COVID, they were paying people to stand at train stations and hand out flyers. They’d be offering like 50, 60, 70,.sometimes 80% off your order. Some of them were one time use only, but the lower value ones like 40% were usually reusable if you got a new code. Eventually by this point where you have to sign up for a monthly subscription to get any discount, it’s already kinda ingrained in my life and once or twice a week when I “can’t be arsed cooking” I end up just ordering something in and blowing 20 or 30 bucks on a meal rather than just keeping a pizza or some salad or other easy meals in the freezer
I could rant for a long time about the uberification of food delivery. Even places offering “in house” food delivery usually end up using on demand uber eats drivers anyway. Then they’ll have the audacity to mark everything up 30%, charge a card surcharge, service fee, bag fees, priority delivery fee, on top of a delivery fee. Places that manage their own deliveries with hourly employees, not “iNdEpEnDeNt CoNtRaCtOrS” goes in my good books
Reminds me of something I heard back in 'zine times. “The trick is not to ignore the mainstream, but to selectively raid it for things we can use.” -Mike Gunderloy. The resources are there, so go ahead and use them – just do it on your own terms, consciously. I don’t have Amazon Prime, but when my elderly relative needed a safety device and I could only find it on Amazon, you bet I got it from there.
I use affirm pretty often and usually there are options where you extend the term a few months but add interest. Haven’t paid interest cause I have that luxury but being able to extend large purchases over 2-3 months without interest is amazing.
Sounds to me like they’re waiting for people to get used to this model for every purchase before they quietly add interest.
ikr this is literally step 1 of enshittification.
Even knowing this and the grand plan, I feel like I get sucked in, too. It starts as “wanting to stick it to the man” by taking them up on whatever overly generous deal they feel like offering. “I know they’ll get rid of it eventually, but there’s no harm in abusing it while I can”. But any “good” company won’t just instantly quadruple their prices and sack all of their customer service staff on the spot. It’ll always start off slowly. They’ll offer promotions that are 5% less generous, they’ll start to charge bag fees or service charges. They’ll impose minimum transaction amounts. Etc.
By the time it becomes obvious, it usually too ingrained in your life, and the lives of many others to easily ditch. I saw this happen a lot with uber eats and Doordash. During COVID, they were paying people to stand at train stations and hand out flyers. They’d be offering like 50, 60, 70,.sometimes 80% off your order. Some of them were one time use only, but the lower value ones like 40% were usually reusable if you got a new code. Eventually by this point where you have to sign up for a monthly subscription to get any discount, it’s already kinda ingrained in my life and once or twice a week when I “can’t be arsed cooking” I end up just ordering something in and blowing 20 or 30 bucks on a meal rather than just keeping a pizza or some salad or other easy meals in the freezer
I could rant for a long time about the uberification of food delivery. Even places offering “in house” food delivery usually end up using on demand uber eats drivers anyway. Then they’ll have the audacity to mark everything up 30%, charge a card surcharge, service fee, bag fees, priority delivery fee, on top of a delivery fee. Places that manage their own deliveries with hourly employees, not “iNdEpEnDeNt CoNtRaCtOrS” goes in my good books
Reminds me of something I heard back in 'zine times. “The trick is not to ignore the mainstream, but to selectively raid it for things we can use.” -Mike Gunderloy. The resources are there, so go ahead and use them – just do it on your own terms, consciously. I don’t have Amazon Prime, but when my elderly relative needed a safety device and I could only find it on Amazon, you bet I got it from there.
I use affirm pretty often and usually there are options where you extend the term a few months but add interest. Haven’t paid interest cause I have that luxury but being able to extend large purchases over 2-3 months without interest is amazing.