What we are actually getting now
I want to talk about something that is not abstract. Something you ran into this week, probably more than once, and either shook your head at or just absorbed because absorbing it has become the habit. I want to talk about what has happened to the basic things. The everyday things. The things you buy and use and depend on and used to be able to count on.
Because something has changed. Not all at once. Gradually, quietly, in ways that are easy to dismiss one at a time. But when you step back and look at the whole picture — the food, the products, the vehicles, the service, the workforce — a pattern emerges that is hard to ignore once you have seen it. The thing itself has been degraded. Across the board. And we are paying more for it.
— — —
Start with food because that is the most personal. You bring meat home from the grocery store. The date on the package says it is good for four more days. Two days later it has turned. That is not a fluke — that is a pattern that enough people have noticed that it barely surprises anyone anymore. The date on the package is not telling you when the product will go bad. It is telling you something else, something that benefits the seller more than it protects you.
And then there is the packaged meat that comes off a processing line that has evidence — right there in the package, visible — that the equipment was not properly cleaned before your food went through it. Not a question of whether it happened. You can see it. That is not a quality control failure. That is the absence of quality control. There is a difference. A failure means the system tried and missed. The absence means nobody was really watching in the first place.
Use by dates across the board have become suggestions rather than guarantees. The product that used to last reliably until the date stamped on the bottom now has a different relationship with that date — one that is more optimistic than honest. You learn to buy with suspicion now. You learn to smell before you cook and check before you trust. That should not be the relationship between a buyer and their food. That is not how it used to work.
— — —
It is not just food. Look at what gets built now. New cars that carry a price tag that would have bought you a house not long ago, and underneath the screens and the features and the marketing language there are materials and tolerances that do not match that price. Panels that fit a little wrong. Components that should last the life of the vehicle that are made to last the warranty period. Things that used to be built with the assumption that the owner would keep it for ten or fifteen years, now built with the quiet assumption that you will have traded it in before the real problems show up.
RVs are perhaps the most honest example of the whole problem because they make almost no effort to hide it anymore. Walk through a new RV and look past the granite countertops and the decorative finishes. Look at what is underneath. Particleboard. Staples. Joints that will separate the first season you use it hard. Walls that will not survive moisture because they were never meant to. The outside says adventure and the inside says we built this to sell, not to last. People spend serious money on these things. Life savings in some cases. And what they get is a product that the manufacturer knows will have problems and has structured the warranty to minimize their exposure when those problems arrive.
— — —
Now talk about quantity. Because it went a different direction than quality and cost — it went up, or it appears to have gone up. More options. More products on the shelf. More channels, more choices, more everything everywhere all the time. The appearance of abundance.
But look closer at the actual product in your hand. The can that used to hold sixteen ounces now holds thirteen and a half. The bag that used to be full is now full of air with product underneath it. The portion at the restaurant that used to be generous is now calculated to the fraction of an ounce because someone ran the numbers and found the margin in the reduction. Everything has been quietly trimmed. Shrunk. Reduced inside the same packaging so that the change is hard to see unless you have been paying attention for long enough to remember what it used to be.
They call it shrinkflation when economists discuss it. I call it a quiet dishonesty. You are paying the same price or more for measurably less product and nobody announced the change and nobody apologized for it. It just happened. And the assumption was that you either would not notice or would not bother to say anything about it.
— — —
And then there is the human end of it. The service. The workforce. The person on the other side of the counter or the phone or the register.
I am not interested in blaming individuals here. That is too easy and it misses the point. What I am pointing at is a systemic failure to train, to invest in people, to create any expectation of craft or knowledge or genuine service. You walk into a store and cannot find anyone who knows what they are selling. You sit down at a restaurant that is understaffed not as an accident but as a policy — because fewer people per table means lower labor cost per ticket. The person who is there is covering too many tables and has not been trained well enough to cover one properly and is working for wages that do not inspire the kind of care that good service requires.
The result is that the experience of being served — of being a customer in the old honest sense of that word — has been replaced by something that resembles service without delivering it. You go through the motions on one side of the counter and they go through the motions on the other side and both of you know it is not what it should be and neither of you has the power to change it in that moment.
— — —
Here is what ties all of it together. The food, the vehicles, the products, the service. What ties it together is the removal of accountability from the transaction. When a man’s name was on his work — literally on it, or practically on it because his business was small enough that everyone in town knew who made the thing — quality had a floor. It could not fall below a certain point because the maker would feel it personally. His reputation was the product. His livelihood depended on the next customer trusting him the way the last one did.
That connection has been broken at scale. The maker is a corporation. The product is a SKU. The customer is a unit. Nobody’s name is actually on it in any way that costs them something personally when it fails. The accountability has been engineered out of the system. What replaced it is marketing — the appearance of quality, the language of care, the packaging that suggests craftsmanship while the thing inside it was built to a margin target by people who will never meet the person who buys it.
We have accepted this. That is the part I keep coming back to. We have absorbed it so gradually and so completely that most people have simply adjusted their expectations downward. They buy with suspicion. They use with low expectations. They replace sooner than they should have to. And they pay more at every step.
I am old enough to remember when the transaction was honest. When you paid a fair price and got a fair thing and both sides of that exchange meant what they said. I am not sure that is coming back on its own. But I think the first step toward anything better is to stop pretending it is fine. To say clearly and without apology — this is not what it should be. We know the difference. And we deserve better than this.
“Intelligent People Assume Nothing” | Michael S Faust Sr. | Substack
Unauthorized commercial use prohibited. © 2026 The Faust Baseline LLC
