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 historic quality or niche. Nowadays the dozens of brands are owned by 2-4 companies, 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.
Very true, the quality of products has overall gone down, but the idea that “you get what you pay for” continues to persist regardless.