like I went to taco bell and they didn’t even have napkins out. they had the other stuff just no napkins, I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don’t get napkins! so they can save $100 per quarter rather than provide the barest minimum quality of life features.
The napkins thing is a thing at McD near me.
You have to stand there and wait for about five minutes to flag down a member of staff (they’re all in the back now due to the self serve kiosks). The same for sauces. Which to me says that my time is meaningless to them. They don’t trust us to not take too many but they’re also too lazy to put some in every customers bag.
I will no longer eat there due to this and the crazy prices for the same mediocre food.
Fucking ghouls. Yet we have debates at work all the time and I’m seen as some weirdo for not wanting to be fleeced by every company on the planet.
Be like me and steal what you can from these companies. Commit delivery fraud (item never arrived when it did). Raise chargebacks etc. take what you can as that’s what they’re doing. Just don’t do it to sole businesses.
Be like me and steal what you can from these companies. Commit delivery fraud (item never arrived when it did). Raise chargebacks etc. take what you can as that’s what they’re doing. Just don’t do it to sole businesses.
Nah, don’t do this.
Imagine being an Uber Eats or Deliveroo driver trying to make an honest living and getting sacked because some absolute bloomy rind dick cheese told people on the internet to submit fraudulent non-delivery claims.
Now imagine they alert other businesses that you steal from customers and now you’re unemployable because of what I stated above.
You’re suggesting something that will seriously fuck over the average wagie but still keep the board of directors in their comfy black leather seats. Just don’t give them your business.
I’m willing to bet you never actually worked in a customer facing job, otherwise you’d have more empathy for the average worker…
Also, every job I’ve had until my current one has been customer service. Either facing or over the phone. Should have taken that bet.
For sure. Steal from the till of a megacorp who gives a shit, get a gig worker fired for a free burrito? Thats a huge dick move
I’m not stealing food from Uber eats bro. I’m talking orders from Amazon and claiming they sent an inferior item.
Edit: also I ain’t ever ordering Uber Eats. Paying double for someone to bring me soggy food.
Stealing from Amazon will never not be ok.
The collapse has started! Now we get to experience the catabolism.
It’ll be a capitastrophe.
We really can vote with our dollars. The issue is that we don’t (I’m point right at myself here).
Don’t buy the things, we probably don’t need em.
Induvidual action will never be enough, ‘voting with your wallet’ is a fantasy.
It’s a pretty complicated economics question why inflation is happening. They’re working on it by adjusting interest rates, I guess.
As for why the average American isn’t doing so well, it’s basically the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer. If this same inflation was happening with a 70’s distribution of wealth (and IIRC it actually did) it wouldn’t be fun but it wouldn’t be pushing so many people to the brink, either.
You are all foolish and thought global suicide was NOT their primary objectives. Corporations, Wealth, Religion, etc. etc. are all thing you would call bullshit but the God of the Dead is sick of your shit.
I’m with you, OP: for some reason, it’s the little things I notice.
I’m in grocery stores a lot. It used to be, there was a nice little seating area there to sit, drink my coffee and work. But now, because homeless people dared to duck inside a public-facing area to briefly escape the elements, they removed many of the tables and chairs and they’re now a big, empty space. Heaven forbid they add more seating, actually staff enough people to enforce a time-limit, etc; no, instead we all are worse off for it. But corporate profits have bigger been higher, so worth it, right!?
Take a trip to PA, all the grocery and convenience stores have added seating areas so that they can legally sell beer and wine lmao.
Shareholders. Part of me thinks they see the writing on the walls of climate change and want to just get the most they can out of the rest of the short time we have left.
Yep! If everyone keeps buying shitty pastries that come from plastic bags at Starbucks then they’re going to keep making them. Enjoy.
Oh it’s even more complex.
Who sells those napkins?
(Answer; Sysco. If a place is short on napkins, Sysco is turning the screws on the franchise owner).
Everything is cheaper and made of thinner materials. But I can’t tell if it tastes worse because it’s of lesser quality or because of the covid I had.
Ngl think it’s this too, read somewhere that dyes used in commercial products were strained so some products started literally looking thinned out. Personally I saw it in our lab gloves, the blue dye was looking…not uniform. Everywhere there is probably some strain on production and people being stressed tf out.
Unregulated capitalism.
I cant wait to be arrested for not noticing the napkin dispenser is empty fast enough
there wasn’t even a dispenser lol felt like i was going crazy
I’m incredulous.
You’re right in that taco bell wants to maximise profits, but surely the provision of napkins allows them to produce more profit.
I mean a lot of companies are doing a lot of shitty things worthy of criticism, but I don’t think that this is one of them.
const_void fighting the good fight at…checks notes… lack of napkins…….
Yes… capitalism…and not consumers who just don’t care.
It’s both lack of regulation and lack of consumer activism.
Not even that, just a government that doesn’t care.
A gov is people, if you’re being ruled by your inferiors then it’s time to step up and lead, but people won’t. Easier to bitch. Myself included.
This is by far the biggest problem - most people don’t put up with that shit and will publicly murder a company that tries it on.
It’s just this one country, you know, the one with the guns, that rolls over to get their bellies scratched when the billionaires come knocking
The billionaires are just like us folks, they drive honda civics and sleep in 50k tiny homes next to their rockets.
You’re gonna get a lot of downvotes but people really are too pacified by binge watching Survivor while scrolling through TikTok. People don’t get angry about the shit that matters, not when it’s much easier to be angrier about Star Wars not being good anymore.
Those fucking ghouls at Taco Bell, not providing us napkins! What a deprived nation we are. I had to wipe my face with a tree stump! You can’t get straws or drink lids anymore either at some restaurants. After all, the CEOS might have to forego an extra frog leg at dinner if they started providing us with napkins or straws for FREE.
That’s the end result of a capitalist system once corporations have superseded governments in power. It will only get worse.
Yeah, we may be at checkmate. Unlike the end of the age of the robber barons, when we reformed capitalism in the late 1800s / early 1900s in the US… this time the capitalists have purchased enough politicians to stop reform completely and forever.
Uh, didn’t the rich rather famously buy political influence back then as well?
Yes, but not at the same scale. They’ve become masters at it in the modern age.
It helps that the field of psychology has come a long way, and it helps further that being a psychologist to help people pays peanuts, but being a psychologist who helps write ad campaigns to make sure the ads have the most psychological impact pressuring people to buy pays big bucks.
I dunno, from what I’ve read about political machines in the gilded age it was really just as bad back then.
People worked 12 hour shifts 6 days a week back then with no minimum wage. A lot of people lived in company towns and didn’t even get paid in real money. Child labor was legal and widespread, although some shit hole states are getting back to that.
Things are bad now but anyone who thinks it’s as bad as it was in the gilded age is either delusional or extremely ignorant. There’s a reason the progressive era happened, people were pushed beyond their limits and propaganda couldn’t make up for that anymore.
Time to sharpen the guillotines again…
What’s funny is that this is entirely unsustainable. If they were in any way a real “capitalist” they would realize that the creeping authoritarianism they’re pushing destroys economies long-term. They’re laughing all the way to the bank right now because they’re not concerned with the future.
However, they should be, because this House of Cards can easily collapse with the right push. They literally can’t see past the profits at the end of the next quarter.
They literally can’t imagine that all of them choosing to undermine capitalist principles at the same time will result in capitalism failing completely. The only reason it even functioned as well as it did for so long was 1. regulation and 2. raping the third world for resources.
I mean, I’m a fucking leftist, and it makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills that things are so far gone that I’m actually arguing “if we’re going to do capitalism, we may as well do it in a way that it actually functions properly” as if that is a fucking fringe idea here.
The wheels are about to fly off this fuckin turkey.
Money can be an addiction. billionares are basically junkies with mental problems, do not expect them to follow any sense or logic
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what future?? why would they think of anything long term?
they are cashing in while earth can still support human life.
Yep! And their short-sighted greed is going to drive us right to the brink of annihilation. We’re staring down the barrel of environmental collapse and our leaders are generally either old enough they assume they’ll die before it gets “that bad,” and the others stupidly think money makes them immune to the destruction of the biosphere. Anyone under 50 right now is going to live through some incredibly dark times. We are all dogs in a car with the windows closed and the heater on in a Texas parking lot. Business as usual is going to get really ugly, really quickly, really soon.
We are all dogs in a car with the windows closed and the heater on in a Texas parking lot.
except you are human and not a dog and you could take care of the problem with any kind of weapon but you chose not to do anything out of convenience
I wish this were true but good guys with guns are pretty easily stopped by megacorps with security staff
number of people in the world > megacorps and security stuff
And the politicians with police.
The car’s on fire and there’s no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a dark wind blows
The government is corrupt
And we’re on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn
We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death
The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles
It went like this:
The buildings tumbled in on themselves
Mothers clutching babies picked through the rubble
And pulled out their hair
The skyline was beautiful on fire
All twisted metal stretching upwards
Everything washed in a thin orange haze
I said: "kiss me, you’re beautiful -
These are truly the last days"
You grabbed my hand and we fell into it
Like a daydream or a fever
We woke up one morning and fell a little further down -
For sure it’s the valley of death
I open up my wallet
And it’s full of blood
Unfortunately their house of cards is built on a foundation of wealth…and not just fuck you money, but literal centuries of fuck you money.
The fortune 50 I worked for could literally stop doing all business and maintain their current spend for a century and still be solvent.
This isn’t unstable at all…it’s built to last for 100s of years…the current leaders to their grandkids will be safe.
To further that…the 1% have private armies and well stocked bunkers to ride out any social uprising. That’s the really scary stuff.
We are all fucked though. Enjoy the hunger games.
Those armies are going to want to be paid and that’ll be hard to do once currency has no meaning. If we are going to go that route. As a matter of fact, a bunch of the 1% have recently had meetings with “experts” on ways to keep their hired mercenaries from turning on them once things truly collapse.
once currency has no meaning.
You really think those bunkers are filled with cash Scrooge McDuck style? They’ll have food, guns, and likely lots of gold. They’ll also very likely be sustainable.
Keeping the mercs fed and happy is a trivial thing.
we may as well do it in a way that it actually functions properly" as if that is a fucking fringe idea here
Yes, CIA, this post right here.
Thank you! I’ve been reading the responses and many of them hit the mark, but yours is the only one mentioning the sbortsightedness of it all. My brother and I have had many conversations about this subject and agree that part of it has to be some kind of collective brain misfire for the lack of a better phrase, that happens to organisms that get to the level we’re at, since everything that we build moves faster than evolution will allow our brains to adapt to, and while we see all of this as a mistake we’ve made or a small subset of us being greedy and upsetting the apple cart, I posit that it is just our species finally reaching a bottleneck that all species eventually face. We just artificially pushed the ceiling further and further upward so we didn’t see it. I think we are starting to see it though and it’s unlikely that we can do anything to stop from hitting it now.
This goes back to the original sin. It’s stupid to be evil and greedy. The latter is the foundation is their entire ideology is built on the former is the mortar holding together the bricks of other people’s labor their house is built on.
That’s the thing, though, they don’t care about the future. They only want to maximize today’s profits.
Tomorrow is someone else’s problem.
I don’t know how to solve this problem without a massive peiod of hardship for everyone until the societal parasites finally feel the pain , but the cause is pretty obvious.
Hey man, the FTC is doing anti-trust like nobody’s business for the first time since gods-know-when. It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s progress for the first time in forever!
Only 45 upvotes, Lemmy be slipping.
We’re slowly hemorrhaging users. Pretty much all of us upvoted it.
I have noticed. Imma post even harder now. /s
POST HARDER!
(I’ve been posting hard for a while. It gets a bit dispiriting tbh)
I’d love to see a rise in quality OC. Migrating and reposting content isn’t always the answer.
Other platforms have an undeniable wealth of knowledge and a history that’s over a decade long.
That doesn’t mean we can’t make something great out of this. I just know that I’m not the best content producer.
I mean, hypothetically. That is the end result of the neoliberal, or late capitalism economic philosophy if applied on a model. But economic systems in practice are never the philosophy, and are only there in the first place to support the governance of a nation state. I spend half my time in Italy, for example, where the laws protect both the big international brands and the mom and pop shops.
My point is that we are the citizens that make up the government that designs the governance rules for our nation-state. Capitalism is not a government, or people, or the entire story when it comes to commerce and trade systems. We can shape it and use it, like any other framework.
Likewise, regardless of your economic system, greedy people will try to accumulate power, bend the rules to benefit themselves, and extend those benefits across borders if they can. Powerful egos will warp people and rules around them like gravity. All governance systems that strive to be just, collaborative and promote the quality of life of all its citizens have to both put strong rules in place to check the power-hungry, and constantly monitor and adapt to keep them in check.
“…we are the citizens that make up the government that designs the governance rules for our nation-state.”
No we’re not. We only have the illusion of control where we are allowed to vote on how to tinker with the outer edges of a system that is in reality controlled by 0.1% of the population.
Certainly the end result of financialised capital.
I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don’t get napkins!
They were probably just out and too busy to restock or something. It happens. Never been to a fast food place where they don’t provide napkins and I steal napkins from the taco bell I live near regularly. What a weird overreaction.
Ya, this whole thread is unhinged. Very strange.
A lot of people are responding to the title, not to the body of the post.
Why was there no napkin dispenser? Dunno could be a lot of things.
Why does everything get progressively shittier under capitalism? It’s probably not related to the napkin dispenser specifically, but everything under capitalism gets progressively shittier.
Maybe. But there’s a lot of “They’re coming for your napkins to maximize profit!”
Welcome to lemmy. I hate big corporations but some of the people on this site will blame amazon when they stub their toe.
Are you sure they didn’t just conscript the napkins for TP? It is Taco Bell after all…
