My point was that this is just the same tactic that corporations have been using for decades. For example, rather than fix systemic issues that cause them to dump mass amounts of greenhouse gases or toxic waste, they instead reframe the issue so that the consumer is at fault: "you don't recycle enough". This is the same, it's just reframing corporations cutting costs wherever they can as the fault of the consumer rather than just plain entshittification. For the record I agree with your point about eating meat and such, it's just not relevant to the discussion at hand and used just as a cheap appeal to emotion/shame.
gruez|4 months ago
This is a strawman. Even before "recycling is a lie" entered into the zeitgeist a few years ago, approximately nobody thought people failing to recycle led to greenhouse gas or toxic waste, or that recycling was going to prevent those things. At best they did it out of some vague sense of "environment". If pressed they'll probably say something about landfill space or sea turtles, but I doubt they thought recycling was going to stop global warming, or clean up the polluted rivers in China/India.
>This is the same, it's just reframing corporations cutting costs wherever they can as the fault of the consumer rather than just plain entshittification.
To some extent it is the fault of the consumer. Restaurants are a competitive market with low barriers to entry. If consumers actually want unique local flavors an non-frozen foods, and are willing to pay a premium for it, sysco would have never gotten a foothold. Sure, cheap frozen food is objectively bad and you'd have a tough time finding someone who'd explicitly say "yes, I do want reheated frozen food at restaurants", but if people are willingly choosing it, then it's just demonstrating expressed preference vs revealed preference. The fact that mcdonalds serves cheap low quality food (compared to even something like olive garden) can't be blamed on "plain entshittification".
dj_mc_merlin|4 months ago
This is rooted in the assumption that capitalism provides what people want, rather than the worst that they will still accept. Endlessly cutting costs and then blaming the tastes of the consumer is why people put out anti-corporation pieces like the original video. That is not to say that Sysco is not operating logically.. but if the best move in a system leads to an unfavourable outcome for those that should benefit from it, then the system itself is the problem. Or another way to phrase it: there is a reason why that video resonated with many people that goes beyond trying to blame others for your problems.