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. 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?

When 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 soon realized they were all owned by the VF Corporation after a wave of acquisitions in the 2000s. 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.

Big conglomerates and private equity were buying up “trusted brands and riding that reputation out until it was a husk of what it was”.

From a zipper jam on a nearly new coat to a casserole dish cracking in the oven on its third use, Americans are finding that the quality of many once-beloved name brands is declining. Three-quarters of Americans had a quality or service issue in 2025, the National Consumer Rage Study found, double the rate since the survey started in 1976. And customer complaints have reached record levels, according to the latest University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Sapp channeled his personal frustration into building a database of hundreds of brands and ranking them “approved” to “avoid” based in part by their corporate ownership. And as part of his publication, Worse on Purpose, he explains the financial transactions that have undercut the quality of some of the biggest name brands.

Sapp sees a structural problem within the consumer retail industry: founders who built brands they love take lucrative offers from big corporations or private equity investors. While they cash in on the decades it took to build their product’s brand, the new corporate owners eventually prove they don’t have the same emotional investment and are distanced from loyal customers.

“When you’re running everything from an office building that has no relation to where the product is manufactured and people who are doing the manufacturing”, quality is going to suffer, Sapp said.

Big US companies haven’t always been associated with lower-quality products, of course. Purchasing a product from a well-known national brand was often associated with guaranteed quality and consistent customer service for much of the last century.

But in recent years, investors have become increasingly “big and powerful” due to the pro-shareholder rights movement and the growth of large institutional investors, explains Dorothy Lund, a law professor at Columbia University. That increased shareholder power can contribute to consumer harm.

Thanks to activist investors, many company executives face what feels like “gun-to-the-head pressure to maximize shareholder returns”, or be fired, she said.