1w ago

Why do a lot of consumers behave masochistically towards companies?

I wanted to ask for long time this question, Why does this keeps happening?

Apple, Kagi, Vivaldi, news companies and even Google.

I started seeing a good amount of people who stopped caring about consumer rights/freedom and started to think and advocate for companies.

Even in non-brands cases, a lot of people buy the product with the highest price, because they think that it has a higher quality despite the fact that there is no necessary correlation between both.

How do I know that? I know a shop that buy cheap products and sell them with very expensive price tag, to my surprise they are making insane profits.

What is happening?

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When people are unable to make a determination of quality based on actual information, or don't have the time to do so, a lot of them default to expensive = good.
Think about it this way. Let's say you wanted to buy a washing machine that would last you 10 years. You would do research, you'd possibly look up how good each company is based on previous models and how long these have lasted. And then you'd pick some model and buy it. You're not buying it because it's good, you're buying it because their reputation tells you it might be good. But maybe that company decided to sell you cheap garbage this time (looking at you Nvidia). You would never know until it's too late.
And this is why economics 101 is as useless as physics 101. In physics, they assume no friction. In economics, they assume perfect knowledge.
- To help bolster your point, a saying I have heard my whole life is:
  You get what you pay for.
  The implication is that you get a better product by paying a higher price. This saying is deep cultural meme (not the internet kind of meme, rather the Dawkins kind of meme) in the US. I have heard it used my whole life from fellow citizens.
  
  This was true before the last 2-3 decades of globalisation, outsourcing, diversification, vertical integration, private equity, consolidation, and monopolization.
  30-40 years ago most established sectors had a dozen brands across cheap, mid-market and expensive tiers. Most of the expensive brands were expensive because of consistent quality or niche. Nowadays the dozens of brands are owned by 2-4 multinationals, and there's barely any brands left that haven't been plundered and bled dry in the eternal race to the bottom for short term profit.
  Pre GFC the US had 50-100 banks above a moderate size (can't member). Post GFC there were like a dozen left; nowadays there's probably half as many.

Psychological theory advances every year, but we don't get more resistant. Not only do we all have basically the same brain, but our culture is gradually shaped to prevent us from having unprofitable ideas, like that mercy and compassion are values that area genuinely important to cultivate.
- Seriously. The human psyche was not designed for information overload. It evolved for hunting, gathering, socializing within a small group, and having a limited diet.
  Now we got dopamine machines in our pocket, peer pressure from corporations, and rich foods that screw up our health, but leave us hungering for more. And we can have more, we're told we can have more, it will improve our life more, so we crave more dispite the cost to health, sanity, and immediate social groups.
  
  Humans didn't become effective hunters until after we started using technology. We're not evolved for hunting. We have the biology of herbivores, for crying out loud! The more meat we eat, the younger we die and the more diseases we experience. [1] [2] We're evolved for running, sweating, speaking, and eating starches.
  Inducing consumption of meat, and corrupting people's scientific understanding of our natural history and biological needs, is exactly one of the goals of contemporary capital.

price is what people are willing to pay for.
what also makes it suck more is that there's really no sure science on how to dictate price.

Common wisdom:
Cheap - Good - Fast
You can only pick two. Is this necessarily true? Not always, but a lot of the times... yeah.

Stockholm Syndrome?
For example, once you get an Apple product, you get more out of it by buying MORE Apple products. Even if you WANT to get out, all the photos and songs in the cloud will be lost if you switch from Apple, so you just stick with what you got. Besides, Google does similar things, so you might as well stock with the devil you know. You just have to keep hoping that the other side gets shittier faster than yours does.
As for price = quality. We know that higher quality things DO cost more than garbage, but thanks to how easy it is to lie on the Internet, shady dealers are marking up their garbage in hopes that you'll think it's higher quality than all the other garbage. I don't blame the people for this, it's a con, and those people are being victimized by predators.

you've got two important ideas I want to separate; people moving towards concern for welfare of company over people, and product pricing.
Enshittification (platform decay) describes the pattern where products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, passionate developers create things that match their vision, and consumers benefit from this labor of love. Eventually they degrade their services to maximize profits for shareholders. Inside the company, it's because the owners get rich and money is more important to them than their vision. Outside the company, customers favor big corporations because they think small companies aren't successful companies. Many people would be surprised to learn that small businesses employ 45.9% of American workers, or about 59 million people. It's not that the small companies "haven't made it yet". They're literally the backbone of our economy.
As for product pricing, I'm with you 100%. Buy dollar store shampoo that smells good, it's the only bottle in my shower. It's exactly as effective as the pricey stuff.
- As for product pricing, I’m with you 100%. Buy dollar store shampoo that smells good, it’s the only bottle in my shower. It’s exactly as effective as the pricey stuff.
  No, the cheapest stuff is not as good as the pricey stuff. The midrange priced stuff is as good as the expensive stuff, but the cheapass shampoo and other grooming products are absolute trash and likely to have lead or other contaminants.
  Take canned vegetables at a factory. Yes, the factory sells to different companies with different reputations and who each enforce different quality control. A can of green beans from the same factory sold by the expensive company will never have stems or leaves in their cans, but the cheaper ones might. Is the price difference worth it? Probably not. Are some canned foods like kidney beans indistinguishable between cheap and expensive? Probably.
  
  Relevant to your point:
  The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
  Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
  But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
  -Terry Pratchett
  
  There's optimal cheap and too cheap. Someone always wants to be the cheapest in its class, and they'll compromise on quality to get there.

What is happening?
Stupid won. People all over the world are willingly shoveling shit into their faces as though they were trying to win a hotdog eating contest.

With tech it's about convenience imo. I am privacy-concious, trying to avoid services like google, but a game's EULA? scrolls to the bottom Accepted. Do Russians mine bitcoins on my machine? Is Unity surveilling me? Who knows.
Then of course these brands put a lot of effort into strengthening consumer loyalty. Make their stores a nice place to be, offer plans especially to minors, so they get used to their products and eco-systems early on. For example Google's ChromeOS laptops in schools. They are cheap and... well... are cheap.
But overall, I think consumers do not realize what they are buying because many buy impulsively, or simply don't know or care about the impact of their purchases. And to some degree, who can blame them? Who has the energy to sort through anything in the grocery store and determine which products are produced through slavery, animal cruelty, stealing the local population's water, aren't sourced locally etc. Because at that point, there's probably nothing left.

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