When Keyana Sapp, 31, went shopping for a new backpack, the brands he remembered as a kid were just not the same.
He researched the companies, from North Face to JanSport and Eastpak, and soon realized they were all owned by the VF Corporation after a wave of acquisitions in the 2000s. After a Reddit post he made about his discovery picked up traction, he started looking at other types of consumer goods – cookware, shoes, tools, clothing.
“It seems like that was a story that just repeated in every industry,” Sapp told the Guardian.
If you don’t have factories or long term agreements your QA is stressed and there’s no guarantee what you’re getting as a buyer. From some subcomponent being inferior to quality differences between factory and b to all of this and worse…
While it’s not a guarantee of bad, it’s a risk, and it’s the company saying the build and outcome doesn’t matter.
This is one way enshitification works.