Website/Worse on Purpose
- Reader-funded newsletter by Keyana Sapp, published on beehiiv (
rss.beehiiv.com/feeds/J17ICFTI1f.xml), investigating how trusted consumer brands got cheaper to make and quicker to break, and who profited from the decline. - No ads, affiliate links, or sponsors; funded by reader memberships/donations.
- Each edition takes one product category and traces the ownership chain behind the decline:
- Cookware — Pyrex, Corelle, Instant Pot, and Oneida consolidated under one buyout firm.
- Running shoes — most brands abandoned factory ownership for a shared pool of contract manufacturers.
- Cars — mechanical quality improved while the financing/purchase experience got worse.
- Maintains a companion "Brand Ledger" database rating brand ownership history and current purchase-worthiness.
Relation to Enshittification
- Enshittification names a decline specific to digital platforms: subsidize users, shift value to business customers, then extract from everyone — enabled by lock-in, switching costs, and network effects.
- Worse on Purpose documents a parallel decline in physical goods, but the mechanism differs: private-equity and conglomerate rollups acquire trusted brand names, consolidate manufacturing onto the same small pool of contract factories, and cut material and build quality while holding the brand and price steady — extracting against accumulated reputation rather than platform lock-in.
- The two converge on the same effect: competition that looks real on the surface (different platforms, different brands) turns out to run on the same underlying extraction, and "switching" stops being a real exit — to a different app owned by the same conglomerate, or a different label off the same factory line.
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