I'll vouch for that
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Not your imagination: from backpacks to food, consumer goods are getting worse
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/10/consumed-consumer-goods-quality
My own experiences attest to this assertion. Over $2k for a lawn tractor that was rubbish and only worked 1.5 years. Several hundred dollars for a piece of shit clothes washer that only worked 3 years. Anything from Walmart where you're lucky if it works by the time you get it home. Fruit and vegetables don't have the quality they had just a few years ago. On and on.
I'm keeping this link in my bookmarks: https://ledger.worseonpurpose.com/
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Geeze. From the "watchlist" write up on cookware...
Six companies, eighty-one brands
Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof, and we'll come back to it, because that story is a doozy.
Groupe SEB, the French conglomerate behind T-fal, bought All-Clad in 2004, WMF in 2016, Lagostina, the Emeril license, and, as of January 2025, de Buyer, the French carbon steel maker everyone recommends as the antidote to enshittification (let’s see what their new owners do with that reputation). SEB announced up to 2,100 job cuts this February, with German outlets reporting three plants on the block.
Meyer, a family-owned manufacturing giant out of Vallejo and Thailand, makes over 120,000 pans a day that almost never say Meyer on them: Farberware cookware, KitchenAid cookware, Rachael Ray, Circulon, Anolon. The KitchenAid pots at Target have the mixer company's name and Meyer's Thai steel.
Newell Brands bought Calphalon in 1998, promised nothing would change. It moved production to China, and closed the last American Calphalon plant outside Toledo at the end of 2023, 130 jobs. Newell is the company that did the same to Mirro in Manitowoc two decades earlier, and this April Manitowoc sued Newell for $6 million to clean up the mess it left.
American Securities, another private equity firm, bought Conair in 2021, and Cuisinart with it. Cuisinart's food processors were already the subject of the largest kitchen appliance recall in CPSC history, 8 million units whose aging blades cracked and shed metal into food, with 69 reports of fragments and 30 injured mouths.
Lifetime Brands owns or rents nearly everything else with a dead founder's name on it: Farberware kitchenware and knives, Mikasa, Pfaltzgraff, the American license for Sabatier. It manufactures almost nothing. Its one growth business in a money-losing 2025 was Dolly Parton housewares, up 150 percent.
The problem with buying from any of the above is the incentive underneath the label. When a brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it: thinner steel here, an offshored handle there, a warranty rewritten by lawyers instead of engineers, and so on…
Nobody has run this playbook with more gusto than Centre Lane. Run it all the way out and the ending looks like this: one firm holding most of the surviving legacy American tableware names, a state monopoly case grinding through discovery, and the plant that made Pyrex for 132 years standing empty in western Pennsylvania.
More of the write-up here: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose
The industrial revolution cheapened everything.
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Geeze. From the "watchlist" write up on cookware...
Six companies, eighty-one brands
Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof, and we'll come back to it, because that story is a doozy.
Groupe SEB, the French conglomerate behind T-fal, bought All-Clad in 2004, WMF in 2016, Lagostina, the Emeril license, and, as of January 2025, de Buyer, the French carbon steel maker everyone recommends as the antidote to enshittification (let’s see what their new owners do with that reputation). SEB announced up to 2,100 job cuts this February, with German outlets reporting three plants on the block.
Meyer, a family-owned manufacturing giant out of Vallejo and Thailand, makes over 120,000 pans a day that almost never say Meyer on them: Farberware cookware, KitchenAid cookware, Rachael Ray, Circulon, Anolon. The KitchenAid pots at Target have the mixer company's name and Meyer's Thai steel.
Newell Brands bought Calphalon in 1998, promised nothing would change. It moved production to China, and closed the last American Calphalon plant outside Toledo at the end of 2023, 130 jobs. Newell is the company that did the same to Mirro in Manitowoc two decades earlier, and this April Manitowoc sued Newell for $6 million to clean up the mess it left.
American Securities, another private equity firm, bought Conair in 2021, and Cuisinart with it. Cuisinart's food processors were already the subject of the largest kitchen appliance recall in CPSC history, 8 million units whose aging blades cracked and shed metal into food, with 69 reports of fragments and 30 injured mouths.
Lifetime Brands owns or rents nearly everything else with a dead founder's name on it: Farberware kitchenware and knives, Mikasa, Pfaltzgraff, the American license for Sabatier. It manufactures almost nothing. Its one growth business in a money-losing 2025 was Dolly Parton housewares, up 150 percent.
The problem with buying from any of the above is the incentive underneath the label. When a brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it: thinner steel here, an offshored handle there, a warranty rewritten by lawyers instead of engineers, and so on…
Nobody has run this playbook with more gusto than Centre Lane. Run it all the way out and the ending looks like this: one firm holding most of the surviving legacy American tableware names, a state monopoly case grinding through discovery, and the plant that made Pyrex for 132 years standing empty in western Pennsylvania.
More of the write-up here: https://www.worseonpurpose.com/p/your-cookware-got-worse-on-purpose
This is why I'm terrified that something in our house will break. Not because we can't afford to replace it, but because the options we'll have to replace it with will most surely be lower quality and not last as long.
When a brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it: thinner steel here, an offshored handle there
And this is why Mr SK can't find the kinds of pans he wants.
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Printers.
My old HP (circa 1998) was built like a tank. And cost $750 I think.
Now it’s the ‘razor and blade’ model so they make the printers as cheap as possible knowing they’ll make it up on ink sales.
There are many exceptions though, also in consumer electronics. Every computer I’ve purchased is objectively much better than the previous one.
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Great information, Bernard! Most of our kitchenware is at least 20 years old and we’re pretty happy with it.
I always thought that the box any product comes in should display the name of the “ultimate” owner, the company at the top of the chain.
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