It’s becoming commoner for companies to nerf their products while keeping the same price point, as a cost-cutting, profit-maximizing strategy. The means by which they do this is to first build customer trust in a good well-made product, then secretly change the formula years later, New Coke-style, and pass off an inferior version of the same product, exploiting their customer loyalty and the unwillingness of customers to flee a well-regarded and known brand.
Eventually, customers catch on, but it takes a long time, and meanwhile the company has added more gelt to their executives’ golden parachutes. When enough purchasers of the nerfed product scream at customer service, the company will either discontinue the nerfed product and release a new, improved product that is a facsimile of the better, older product (except at a higher price point), or less likely will quietly return to the older better product build as if nothing was ever changed in the manufacturing process. Or the company will just outright ignore customer complaints while distracting the plebs with rainbow flags plastered on the company home page.
This is truly vile greedy dishonest corporate behavior that your typical lolbertarian would defend to his last breath (usually the breath when nearing the top of the stairs), and paradoxically, monopsonistic middleman online storefonters like Amazon may make the problem worse by conditioning people to buy based on customer review stars. A five star product will gain an out-sized market share through AmaZOG, and likewise a level of customer trust with which mom & pop word-of-mouth can’t compete.
This Amazon-conditioned product trust isn’t easily dislodged when the product manufacture experiences a deiberate decline in quality, because people are conformist sheep who will find it hard to give up on a product with lots of shiny stars next to it. Enough bad reviews of a nerfed product will eventually sink its sales, but AmaZERG delays that reckoning by, concordantly, nerfing the feedback mechanism of its customer review section.
