Dollar Tree.

It used to have been an unreal experience witnessing the existence of these stores when they came out. Everything for a $1. No joke. The quality of some things have had corners cut and the quantity might’ve been laughable, but there was a good solid purpose for these stores.

And then I started seeing the signs after a few good solid years of shopping there. The first sign was how they stopped selling eggs. This was before the Bird Flu. They stopped selling eggs because they simply couldn’t afford to buy stock and then the price hike to $1.25 happened.

And now they’ve hiked the prices again to $1.50 for some products in a handful of stores. Additionally, they’ve incorporated items going from $2 ~ $15 so they have long lost the role and title of being the most affordable places to shop.

Gone were the days.

  • miss_demeanour@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Tourism, in general, but all the world’s romantic, marvellous and ‘unique’ spots: Venice, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, NYC, San Fran…

    Crowds, rules, fees, more fees, lineups, crowd control, advanced ticket sales(with specific time slots) for natural wonders.

    There’s a Grotto at a National Park on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, Canada that requires you to book at least a day in advance - to park and hike.

    Brutal.

        • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
          0·
          6 months ago

          I shit on rich people daily here… this is about “middle” class loser who wants to see paris though, less carbon waste than the rich but still too much.

          Plus AirBnB economy that essentially ruined most urban cores esp if they are historic.

              • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
                0·
                6 months ago

                Pretty sure they were being sarcastic, but your point makes sense (in conservative world where socialism is Bad) without the clown.

          • NotSteve_@lemmy.ca
            0·
            6 months ago

            So what are you suggesting? We never leave our immediate city? I’m a loser if I want to experience another culture?

            • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
              0·
              6 months ago

              I’m a loser if I want to experience another culture?

              Going to Paris or London or NYC is experiencing another culture. That’s just cospicious consumption.

              Go visit friends and family

                • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
                  0·
                  6 months ago

                  Make some friends there and go stay with them.

                  Paying local merchants for China made trash while eating over priced food specifically made for tourist is deff not culture but that’s what all these “worldly” Us suburbanites consider sufficient lol

  • De_Narm@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    The internet. We’ve had a solid few years, but it has become a giant heap of shit for the most part.

    Back then, not everything was an AI generated, SEO, ad riddled, interaction fishing, time wasting, data collecting nightmare with auto-playing videos and a dark pattern employing cookie banner.

    • kitnaht@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      Not enshittified. We still pay a monthly fee for access to the internet and it still operates in the same way as it did back in the 90s.

      There was auto-playing music, auto-playing gifs, auto-playing banners all over the place, and it was always for time-wasting.

      • criitz@reddthat.com
        0·
        6 months ago

        How fast it is doesn’t matter. We can “do” more on the internet today, but the experience is absolutely more annoying and shitty than it was in the 90s.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
        0·
        6 months ago

        Most of my time on the internet I e generally been able to avoid disruptive tracking and ads. No more. Even for subscriptions: Boston Globe online games require that ad blocking be disabled.

        Most importantly, I just got a new iPad. I paid a crap load of money for something like ten times as fast as the old one, desperately needed …… to look at web pages. Video and games were fine with the kid one, but web pages were not. Now I can browse again

      • stoy@lemmy.zip
        0·
        6 months ago

        it still operates in the same way as it did back in the 90s

        IT guy here, this is just not true.

        Back in the 90s, HTTPS was released in 1994, I remember in the early 2000s that Internet Explorer would warn you that a page was using HTTPS, these days it just the opposite.

        The internet has been encrypted, where is mostly ran in plaintext before.

        Then we have the content on the internet.

        We used to read webpages, mostly static HTML, these days the vast majority of websites is running a content engine, say Wordpress or other backend system that you push content onto. This is a gigantic shift, especially for private websites, sure many people used geocities, but many, many built their own webpage as HTML using a WYSIWYG editor, and just uploaded the file to a server.

        Plenty also wrote their own HTML code and built the webpage like that.

        These are just two examples of how the internet has massively changed since the 90d

      • lightnsfw@reddthat.com
        0·
        6 months ago

        AI is definitely a problem. I can’t remember the last time I tried to Google something technical and didn’t have to wade through 2 pages of links to more or less the same slop that didn’t actually answer anything. The internet peaked in like 2013.

  • defunct_punk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Netflix back in the day. A near-limitless catalog of ad-free movies and TV for $8/month. If you tried selling that today, people would think it was a scam

    • Graphy@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      I knew Netflix existed as a dvd service but back in like 2009 the first streaming ads I saw were on flash game sites so I thought they were scams.

      You know those like sign up for blank free trial and you’ll get 5000 fun bucks in shellshock or whatever

    • idiomaddict@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      I remember first hearing about Hulu sometime around 2007-8 and thinking it was a scam. Free (good) TV for one 30 second ad.

    • bizarroland@fedia.io
      0·
      6 months ago

      For me it’s not so much that the price increased. It’s that what you get for the money vanished.

      I’d pay $40 a month to have a modern version of the Netflix that existed back in 2013.

      Now if you want to have that you’ve got to have netflix, hulu, HBO Max, Showtime, peacock, and 15 other services and spend $35,400 a month for all of them and it’s just not worth the money, time, and hassle.

      • Laurel Raven@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        And even if you did get all of it, the experience would be awful trying to figure out which service has what you want to watch

  • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Google Search. Or search in general. Now it’s all shit and you have to convince it that you actually want to search what you want and not what it thinks you want. Which is sometimes hard and other times impossible. I miss Google Search, it seriously was the best.

      • Rikudou_Sage@lemmings.world
        0·
        6 months ago

        Haven’t had the time to try it yet, but really doubt it’s better than Google at its peak performance.

        Is Kagi the AI powered thing? Or am I mistaking it with something else?

    • Soulifix@kbin.melroy.orgOP
      0·
      6 months ago

      Yeah it’s just starting to look like where no matter what search engine you use almost, they just spit out garbage results. And they try way too hard in being the swiss-army knife of everything.

    • Zonetrooper@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      I’m sorry I came to this late, but this one’s really the best answer.

      We talk a lot about how kids are struggling to recognize fake news, find reputable sources, etc… but I also think about how hard it is to find decent sources these days! I honestly can’t comprehend how kids are learning to do research projects and so on without the ability to easily search for stuff on the internet.

      And while there’s lots of stuff on this threat that was cool while it lasted, I think search engines are one of those things where we never even considered the possibility it would change. Businesses fail, prices go up, experiences get skimped on, but search engines were goddamn magic. They just were. Why would anyone ever want to make them worse? The idea never even crossed out minds.

    • Death_Equity@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      Man, Google search back in the day was great. No search categories like images, shopping, videos, etc. Just give it a query and you get what you wanted. God had no idea what was on the second page of results because the first page had what you wanted in the first half. Your ability to find what you wanted depended on your ability to use the search terms and modifiers.

      • hansolo@lemm.eeEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        The week I changed from HotBot to Google was a revelation. The jump from barely scraping the surface of the web to being able to find anything was like finally getting the full promise of the internet. Can’t be undersold how great Google was from 2001-03 until around 2013-16.

        • zeppo@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          6 months ago

          Wow, I recalled AltaVista, Lucia and Excite but have not thought of HotBot in forever.

        • Brave Little Hitachi Wand@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          6 months ago

          It was so good that “googling it” is still in common parlance, even though the phrase has baggage and isn’t used in the same case-closed tones as it once was.

          • Cousin Mose@lemmy.hogru.ch
            0·
            6 months ago

            I haven’t used Google in a few years (in fact all Google servers are blocked on my network) but I still can’t stop saying “I’ll Google it.”

          • hansolo@lemm.eeEnglish
            0·
            6 months ago

            Oh man, and when all the Boolean operators were revealed to work on search, doing some “Google-Fu” was laughably easy, but blew people away. Back before there was so much noise, anything online was possible to find.

              • hansolo@lemm.eeEnglish
                0·
                6 months ago

                Yeah, that was the last straw TBH.

                I occasionally have to do some OSINT-ish research online, and it keeps getting harder and harder to get what I nerd from Big G. So much noise and trash. 2019 was the year they jumped the shark.

    • NewNewAccount@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      Definitely did not take this for granted. Between 2004 and 2010ish it was remarkable how effective Google was. It’s still alright, just not as good as before.

    • 𞋴𝛂𝛋𝛆@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      It goes deeper IMO. Search no longer respects the user as an autonomous individual with self determination. It has stollen your digital citizenship.

  • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Granted it’s a bit niche, but: skiing + snowboarding.

    I learned to ski as a kid back in the 90s, and have always loved it. Used to be you could get a lift ticket at alpine meadows (where I learned to ski) up in Tahoe for like 40 bucks. Palisades Tahoe (the merged resorts formerly known as Alpine Meadows and Squaw Valley Palisades) now costs between 2-300 a day (surge pricing, ofc) if you buy a ticket day-of - not including rentals/demos/parking/food/etc that a snow enjoyer might also opt for.

    Yeah, fine, it’s a kinda bougie sport, but it’s kinda awful that all these PE firms who are gobbling up all the mountains in the country are not even pretending to keep the prices even remotely reasonable. I don’t need a “curated resort experience”. I just want to slay some gnar pow.

    • effward@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      What’s even worse is that even with these prices, Palisades is absolutely swamped with people on most days that are worth skiing (especially holidays).

      So, unfortunately, the market can clearly bear these prices…

      I definitely miss skiing in Tahoe when I was younger. Much different vibe now with all the crowds :(

      • tea@lemmy.today
        0·
        6 months ago

        What percentage of the market is daily pass vs seasonal pass, I wonder? I think it’s close to half at the big resorts. I feel like mountains (and mountain ownership groups) are pushing hard into the subscription model which means a lot of those people are paying less than the surge cost for the day, but a lot of people are also paying for a year pass but are sitting on their butt at home b/c they don’t actually have time to get out.

        On peak days, both people with onesie-twosie passes and the people with annual passes are out there, I bet.

        • swampdownloader@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          0·
          6 months ago

          Yeah this is a tough one. I think I read something like 70% is pass holders. Stowe, a mountain in Vermont, used to charge $2,000+ for their season pass. Now Epic is ~$700-800 and gives you a bunch more. The lines suck, they treat their workers like shit, they charge for parking, but skiing has generally become more affordable with the mega passes in some regards. I prefer passes like the Indy pass myself anyway.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    Re: Dollar Tree. Even in the pre $1.25 days or $1.50 or whatever they are now, it was well known that they made ends meet by deliberately padding certain items and in the process, preying on the poor people who shopped there who would be unable or unwilling to go to two different stores to complete their shopping trip.

    This was primarily on packaged food products which are easy to comparison shop for if you have the means. Canned goods from them were the worst. They’d charge $1 for lots of things you could get at the grocery store at the time for 59 cents or 79 cents or whatever. And if that wasn’t the play, if you checked the quantities on stuff you’d find that the $1 version they sold was inevitably a smaller can, bottle, or jar versus the $1.79 version from the grocery store. So even if one container appeared less expensive, it was actually a worse deal per ounce.

    I think they also propped up their business an awful lot with disposable party supplies: Balloons, plates, cups, paper hats, napkins, and all that kind of stuff. I imagine that definitely was not a winner for them during Covid.

    • dingus@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Dollar Tree has essentially always been like that. It was never really there for “deals” because of what you mentioned. Usually the items were just smaller packages of things which is why they cost less to begin with.

      But it has always been fantastic for certain kinds of items:

      1. Birthday/greeting cards. They are always simpler and of lesser quality than at other stores. But is anyone really going to keep your card for a prolonged period of time? If they do, it’s probably because of what you wrote in the card to personalized it, not because the card was fancy. I’ve seen greeting cards go for up to $10 in some drug stores which is pretty wild to me. Yes, they are more elaborate, but does it really matter when the cheaper one suffices?

      2. Gift bags. Same dealio as above.

      3. Wrapping paper in very particular circumstances. They have significantly less wrapping paper in the package than at other stores. But I find sometimes it’s a good thing if you only want to wrap a present or two with that style of wrapping paper. If you want to wrap many things or if you want to use more of the same paper in the future, then I’d buy elsewhere to get a larger quantity.

      4. Letting kids pick out some cheap crap from the toy aisle.

      For basically anything else, it’s not worth it imo. But the above have always been where it shines.

      • Soulifix@kbin.melroy.orgOP
        0·
        6 months ago

        Dollar Tree is also great for getting things that are absurdly marked up in price everywhere else. Like Scissors, office supplies, some toiletries and even great for getting things you do intend to dispose of because you don’t want to ruin the better quality version of that item.

        Getting food from Dollar Tree is more misses than hits. Yeah you’ll see frozen vegetables but almost no frozen fruits. Tons and tons of freaking junk food like chips, energy drinks, soda, candy and other junk. But I still don’t knock them because some of the food available at all, are good to make dinner meals out of to stretch rations with.

    • Tehdastehdas@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Enshittified public toilet

      It cheats you in through a back door, looking like an ad-covered kiosk. The main entrance is on the other side.

      In stalls, there are two screens playing ads, sound coming from the one you’re facing.
      Toilet paper brands advertise on dispensers.
      Softest toilet paper has printed portraits of the toilet company’s political enemies.

      Facial recognition measures usage, you pay at exit.
      Exiting after 5 minutes is expensive, but a monthly plan is cheaper.

  • buycurious@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    A lot of fast food places have undergone this due to private equity acquisitions.

    Whataburger and Dunkin Donuts used to be much better around me.

    • Sergio@slrpnk.netEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Oh yeah I used to love eating at Subway, way back in the 90s. Then one day the steak-and-cheese got substantially worse. Then the meatballs got much worse as well. Once they started prioritizing app orders over in-person orders, I realized I didn’t fit into their cost-benefit calculations and haven’t been back since.

    • athairmor@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 months ago

      Dunkin’ Donuts used to make the donuts right there in the store multiple times a day. True story.

  • Zess@lemmy.world
    0·
    6 months ago

    People using real words instead of saying things like “skibidi” and “enshittified.”