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?
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.
Very true, the quality of products has overall gone down, but the idea that “you get what you pay for” continues to persist regardless.