Comment by fennecfoxy
1 day ago
This is not it. Services are bad because month by month year by year, capitalism demands that they produce endless growth. When there's nothing legit left to strip down then they start taking out the floorboards.
Exact same thing as shrinkflation; make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year. And then the next year, and the next.
Delivery services/couriers have been having to deliver more packages faster for less money YoYoYoY.
> make the product smaller for more money because there's no other way that the execs and shareholders get to jerk each other off this year.
That's an amusing image but the real reason they're doing it is that often those assets are used as collateral to acquire debt and cannot, under any circumstances, decrease in value.
It reached a point where it doesn't matter if the service is shitty or not rendered at all - as long as stock increases in value no one cares.
Milton Friedman argued that the sole purpose of a company is to serve its shareholders and lampooned the idea that business has any responsibility for, and I quote, "providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers."
That is very in character for him, but I guess he was referring to the case which originally established this idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.