Ensheinification

Tech is too depressing, so I stayed away from tech for a while. It turns out real life is depressing too¹.

Recently my shoes broke, so I went to Reddit for research. Across all the brands, there’s one thing in common: everything goes up in price, everything goes down in quality.

I bought a pair of sneakers based on the recommendations. The leather turned out to be plastic. They are also $159. (They were leather and under $100 last time.) If you want actual leather, pay $50 more for the “premium” version.² And the leather in the premium version isn’t even that good.

Every time I replace something with a new thing, the new thing is worse.

My mother-in-law bought a new rice cooker. It has 20 settings and none of them cook good rice. The old one had one button and made perfect rice for 10+ years.

I talked to her about it. She said she tried three different rice cookers. The first one made the rice too sticky. The second one had many buttons and bad design³. And all the buttons turned out to cook the same way. The third was also full of buttons and also made sticky rice. She went back to ask the shop staff how the buttons worked. Nobody knew. They’re just salespeople.

Apparently you’re not supposed to use the rice button to cook rice. There are buttons for different grains of rice, quick rice, “cooked rice” (as opposed to raw rice?), soup, porridge… After a lot of trial and error, we settled on the “5-grain rice” button as it’s the least worst.

My wife got into vintage Coach bags for the same reason. The old ones were thick, full-grain leather that lasted forever. The new ones aren’t. Coach knows this, because they now sell restored vintage bags on their own website for $600+, and people snap them up. They are reselling their own superior old product because they won’t make it that way anymore.

Then there’s the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups thing. Gruber wrote a summary of it so I won’t elaborate. But basically they replaced chocolate and peanut butter with crap, and hoped people wouldn’t notice. When called out, they said they made “recipe adjustments that allow us to make new shapes, sizes and innovations”. Innovations!

Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” is about platforms. This is about products. I call it ensheinification, because everything in the market is becoming Shein. You can buy expensive Shein, or you can buy cheap Shein that breaks after 2 uses.

But people’s salaries stay the same. Everything costs more and everything is worse. And whether you like it or not, you are forced to buy lousier stuff at higher prices. If this continues, we’ll eat garbage, own garbage, and spend most of our time watching short videos because that’s the only entertainment that’s still free.