Not your imagination: from backpacks to food, consumer goods are getting worse
Wary consumers have noticed a trend in the ‘enshittification’ of products and services. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenWary consumers have noticed a trend in the ‘enshittification’ of products and services. 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.Angry about fraud or an unsafe product?
- ▪Wary consumers have noticed a trend in the ‘enshittification’ of products and services.
- ▪Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenWary consumers have noticed a trend in the ‘enshittification’ of products and services.
- ▪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
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Guardian — US |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/consumed-consumer-goods-quality |
| Publication time | Mon, 10 Aug 2026 12:00:43 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-10T12:15:42.154Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-10T12:15:42.154Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | uYcYIoeppUkf · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Wary consumers have noticed a trend in the ‘enshittification’ of products and services. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenWary consumers have noticed a trend in the ‘enshittification’ of products and services. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty ImagesConsumedRetail industryNot your imagination: from backpacks to food, consumer goods are getting worseIs it possible to avoid the continuing decline in quality of consumer products brought on by corporate greed?Heather TimmonsMon 10 Aug 2026 08.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 10 Aug 2026 08.02 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleWhen 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…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — US.
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