I know what you’re thinking. “Things were better in the old days” is the oldest complaint in human history. Every generation says it. Socrates probably said it. Your grandfather definitely said it.
So let me get this out of the way up front: nostalgia bias is real. Psychologists call it rosy retrospection — a well-documented cognitive tendency to remember the past as better than it was. We forget the bad stuff, polish up the good stuff, and end up comparing a curated highlight reel of 1995 against the unedited reality of today. I know this. I’ve read the research. I’m aware that my brain is doing this.
And I still think something is measurably wrong.
Not with everything. Not in some grand civilizational collapse. But in a specific, observable, increasingly irritating way that touches almost every consumer interaction I have. The products are worse. The people selling them know less. And the systems designed to help you when things go wrong are engineered — deliberately, I’d argue — to make you give up before you reach a human being.
Let me walk you through it.
The kid in the electronics store
A few weeks ago I walked through a shopping mall about half an hour before closing time. Most of the stores were quiet. And in almost every one, the same scene: young employees sitting behind counters, staring into their phones.
I’m not about to do the boomer rant about kids and their screens. But this observation triggered a memory — or maybe a realization — about something that’s changed fundamentally in retail.
Before smartphones, when a shop was empty and the evening was slow, employees had nothing to do. Nothing except look around the store. Read the product brochures stacked on the counter. Pick up a speaker, a camera, a jacket, and actually handle it. Boredom forced engagement with the inventory. You absorbed product knowledge by osmosis, simply because there was nothing else to absorb.
That mechanism is gone.
I’ve tested this more times than I’d like to admit. I’ll spend ten minutes on my phone researching a product — a speaker system, a pair of headphones, a piece of kitchen equipment — and then walk into the store to buy it. When I ask the employee a basic question about the product they’re selling, I already know more than they do. Every single time. Not because I’m some kind of expert, but because the bar has dropped through the floor.
This isn’t just my perception. Retail training hours have been in decline for years. The shift from specialty stores — where the guy selling you a hi-fi system had been an audiophile for twenty years — to generic big-box chains staffed by whoever applied last Tuesday has created an entire generation of retail workers who are paid minimum wage to stand near products they’ve never used, for a company that invested nothing in teaching them about what they sell.
The transaction used to include knowledge transfer. You went to the store partly because the person there could tell you something you didn’t know. That value proposition is dead. Now the store is just a warehouse with lights, and the employee is a checkout obstacle between you and the exit.
The washing machine that lasted thirty years
My parents had a washing machine that ran for over twenty years. Their fridge lasted even longer. Damn, they still have a freezer that’s almost as old as me, when I think about it. These aren’t exceptional stories — ask anyone over fifty, and they’ll tell you the same.
Now look at the data. A widely cited figure from the National Association of Home Builders puts the average lifespan of a modern washing machine at about ten years. Refrigerators fare slightly better at thirteen. The machines your parents bought in the 1990s routinely doubled those figures.
Part of this is survivorship bias — you remember the ones that lasted, not the ones that broke. Fair enough. But the trend in appliance durability is backed by repair industry data, consumer reports, and the simple observation that appliance companies now make more money from extended warranties and repair services than they do from building things that work.
Clothing tells the same story. The fast fashion model — Zara, H&M, Shein — has produced a race to the bottom in fabric weight, stitching quality, and garment lifespan. A cotton t-shirt from 1995 had measurably more fabric per square meter than one from 2024. The stitching was tighter. The dye held longer. You can argue that it also cost more in real terms, and that’s true. But the point isn’t that cheap things are cheap. The point is that the baseline has shifted downward across the entire market, and even mid-range products now feel disposable in a way they didn’t a generation ago.
Tools are another case study. Craftsman, once the gold standard of American hand tools, moved manufacturing overseas and watched quality decline in lockstep. Stanley, DeWalt, the whole lot — the tools your grandfather left you in the garage still work better than the ones on the shelf at the hardware store.
I’m not romanticizing the past. Plenty of things are genuinely better now — electronics are faster, cars are safer, medical care is miraculous compared to the 1980s. But durable goods, the physical objects you use every day, have gotten measurably worse. The question is why.
The answer, as usual, is incentives. A washing machine that lasts thirty years is a terrible business model. One that lasts eight years and requires a service call at year five is a revenue stream. This isn’t a conspiracy theory — it’s publicly stated corporate strategy. It has a name. Planned obsolescence. And it’s a topic worth its own article, which I’ll get to.
The phone tree from hell
If the product breaks and you want help, good luck.
Customer service has undergone a transformation in the last decade that would be impressive if it weren’t so infuriating. The goal is no longer to help you. The goal is to make you go away.
Call any large company — your telecom provider, your bank, an airline — and you’ll enter a phone tree designed by someone who actively hates you. Press 1 for this. Press 3 for that. Describe your problem to a robot that doesn’t understand you. Get transferred. Describe it again. Get disconnected. Start over.
This has gotten dramatically worse with the introduction of AI chatbots. Companies have figured out that if they put an AI between you and a human, a significant percentage of customers will give up before they ever reach a person. The chatbot doesn’t need to solve your problem. It just needs to absorb your frustration until you stop trying.
Research backs this up. Studies consistently show that consumers overwhelmingly prefer human agents over AI for anything beyond the most basic queries. But companies don’t care about your preference — they care about their cost per interaction. Every call you abandon is money saved.
Some companies have gone further, implementing what UX researchers call dark patterns — interface designs specifically intended to make it difficult to cancel a subscription, reach a human, or file a complaint. The “contact us” page that leads to an FAQ. The chatbot that loops you back to the same three unhelpful options. The phone number that doesn’t exist on the website and has to be found through Google.
This is not incompetence. This is strategy. And it works precisely because most people don’t have the time or energy to fight through it.
The airport, the software, the bridge
The consumer-facing problems are annoying. The institutional ones are scarier.
In early 2023, a cluster of serious runway incursions at U.S. airports got bad enough that the FAA issued a Safety Call to Action. The most serious near-misses — Category A and B, where aircraft nearly collided — rose sharply over the preceding years. An inspector general’s audit found that the FAA had implemented only five of its own twenty-four safety recommendations by late 2024. The good news: the numbers dropped in 2024. The concerning news: the problem was driven heavily by understaffed control towers, and the staffing issue hasn’t been fixed.
Software updates that make things worse have become so common there’s a running joke about it in tech circles. Every major platform — Windows, iOS, whatever your bank is running — has shipped updates that broke features that worked fine before. The instinct to “move fast and break things” has migrated from Silicon Valley startups to institutions where breaking things has consequences.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gives U.S. infrastructure a C grade — the highest in the report card’s twenty-seven-year history, but still a C, with nine out of eighteen categories in the D range and a projected $3.7 trillion investment gap.
None of this is apocalyptic. Planes still fly. Bridges mostly stand. Software mostly works. But the margin for error feels thinner, and the people responsible for maintaining it feel less capable, or at least less supported, than they used to be.
So what’s actually happening?
Here’s my honest assessment, stripped of both nostalgia and doomerism.
Some things are genuinely worse. Product durability has declined, and the incentives driving that decline are structural, not accidental. Retail expertise has evaporated as companies cut training budgets and rely on high-turnover, low-wage staff. Customer service has been deliberately degraded to reduce costs.
Some things are perception. We notice failures more because we’re exposed to more information. A runway near-miss in 1985 might never have made the news. Today it trends on Twitter within hours. Our sense of institutional competence may partly reflect the fact that we now see every crack in the facade, not that the facade has more cracks.
And some things are the predictable result of optimizing for the wrong metrics. Companies optimize for quarterly earnings, not product lifespan. Airlines optimize for on-time departures, not safety margins. Software companies optimize for feature count, not stability. When you measure the wrong thing, you get more of the wrong thing.
The competence crisis, to the extent it’s real, is not about individuals being stupider than they used to be. It’s about systems that have systematically devalued competence — in hiring, in training, in product design, in customer interaction — because competence is expensive and most consumers will tolerate its absence until something breaks badly enough to make the news.
The uncomfortable takeaway
I don’t have a neat solution. I’m not going to tell you to “vote with your wallet” or “support local businesses” or any of that bumper-sticker advice.
But I will say this: recognizing the pattern changes how you move through the world. When you understand that the phone tree is designed to make you quit, you stop blaming yourself for getting frustrated and start treating it as a system to be gamed. When you understand that the kid in the electronics store doesn’t know anything, you do your own research before you walk in. When you understand that the washing machine is built to fail, you buy the one with the best repair track record, not the one with the best marketing.
The world isn’t falling apart. But it is being optimized in ways that don’t serve you. And the sooner you stop being surprised by that, the sooner you can start making decisions that actually work in your favor.
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