Worse on Purpose

A premium brand that got significantly worse but didn't drop the price? Seems obvious that this is going to be a story about private equity or a similar acquisition, and indeed it is. https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ has a giant list of these, with a tracker that breaks down hundreds of once-premium brands and the exact changes that the companies that acquire the brands make to make the things cheaper and worse, capitalizing on the good name of the company until they wear it down completely.

I think trust in general has eroded. Rampant _overt_ corruption at the highest levels of western governments, wars, enshittification[0], decay[1], crumbling infrastructure, constant political gridlock.. It seems like it is everywhere, and people are exhausted. [0]: https://www.worseonpurpose.com [1]: https://decayindex.com

The classic PE monetization strategy is to take an intangible asset and mine it: The one we all see is buying a quality brandname and mining it into oblivion. Plus various accountancy tricks to move the gold into the PE coffers. In your example "very strongly loyal subscription base" is the asset. Fabulous article (I think evergreen through regular edits/updates): https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/the-mechanisms-of-enshittification https://ahapartners.co/thinking/goodwill-isnt-a-rounding-error/

> The worst products are now formerly high quality Western brands with PE overlords that forced them to outsource manufacturing to the lowest bidder. Stanley Black&Decker? https://www.worseonpurpose.com/

- dont see a contact page on your website at all and your archive has only 3 posts https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ - here is an idea for the next post: AAA gaming got worse on purpose. Dont forget to mention anti consumer practices by EA and Ubisoft when you are at it

One massive unmentioned counterexample: High quality Chinese tools continue to proliferate and sucker-punch these brands for being so egregious with quality. They are now the high quality standard if you know what brands to look for, and not because their competition got worse as mentioned here, they are simply iterating and improving and making better tools and designs than they did 10 years ago. Sometimes you are getting the exact same tool as the name-brand but with less warranty for a fraction of the price. "Corporate Greed" is self-correcting in a free and fair market! Vote with your wallet. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/harborfreight/comments/1v1ujxe/hmmm_scarily_s… Which directly contradicts the blog's post about Knipex never selling-out on quality: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-power-tools-got-worse-on-purpose >Knipex is family-owned out of Germany. They make what many consider the best pliers on the planet. Part of a larger group (Knipex Group) but not publicly traded, not for sale.

I appreciate the pushback - happy to address. On the AI question: I use LLMs throughout the process. Research assistance (pulling threads together, checking claims against sources, summarizing industry reports), and editing passes. The reporting, arguments, and editorial judgment are mine. Every factual claim gets verified before it goes out. That's the standard I hold it to, and when I miss (like the DC Shoes paragraph refulgentis flagged), I fix it. Speaking of which, I have updated that section with three sources: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-favorite-brands-got-worse-on-pur… On sourcing more broadly: you're right that the earlier essays need more inline citations. My first essay (backpack) especially is thin. I will go through to retrofit with sources asap. Goal is what I said upthread: to create a public record of who owns what, and what ownership has done to the product. I hate that it has become impossible to track how quality has been eroded across industries. I hope Worse on Purpose can be an antidote to that trend. Palantir is my day job. It is completely unrelated to this work.

> There's no human on the other end of these essays that believes these things. Keyana Sapp is the writer behind it: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/authors/keyana-sapp

This page [0] didn't read as very AI-generated to me. However, it had an interesting link: > within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???" (Italicised part is the link) linking to [1]. When I search that page, I cannot find the word 'fraud' let alone anything like that quote. It's highly suspicious when a linked claim does not support the claim. [0]: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose [1]: https://fortune.com/2024/11/19/crock-pot-explosion-cornell-capital-gol…