Getting Worse
One thing that has bugged me for a while is when a brand goes downhill: there's a multi-year period where they can keep charging a premium based on their old reputation before the quality-lowering catches up with them.
I had an idea for a while to make a website to track such things, after several bad experiences of wasting a lot of time online trying to figure out whether positive reviews for a company were sufficiently recent to still be credible.
Anyway, it turns out someone else has already done this and made a website. I have complicated feelings about this site because I'm pretty sure that much of it is AI generated, and/but simultaneously I thiiiiiiiiiiink it's still correct? O brave new world, that has such people/entities in't. (Well: 'tis new to me).
I don't have anything deep to say about it, so this post just exists to direct you to their website. There's a funny unnameable feeling as a writer/thing-maker, where you plan to do something eventually but it feels like a chore, then you find out someone has already done it, and now you're liberated but also redundant.
Worse on Purpose
Ok, one comment actually: this person, or at least their website, seems more anti-capitalist than I am, whereas I'm closer to a cat theorist. I notice that there's a trend in family-run companies getting bought out and then becoming far less willing or able to catch mice, but I also think the world is more complicated than that – it's possible that the companies get sold because they're no longer able to produce at high quality, or that there's a salience bias in which companies we notice going downhill. Also, I suspect our time is most valuably spent on figuring out how to structure the institutions and incentives so the cats keep mousing (e.g. by siccing a bigger cat on them).