Everything is getting worse.

Last week I got invited to a beta testing program for a cool new app. One of the core features in this app is a recommendation feed where you can share your favorite products with other people.

Struggling to think of something worth recommending, I browsed through my home inventory board on Pinterest and remembered: my favorite bowl!

Favorite bowl in action

It’s a lightweight melamine dish that’s designed to look distressed. It’s the perfect size for noodles, rice, or a salad. It photographs beautifully. A true everyday essential.

Example product recommendation in the Mirour app

While I was writing the recommendation for the app, it dawned on me: I could order another one of these bowls! No more feeling bad when I kept my favorite for myself and served my husband’s dinner in a different vessel. I popped over to Williams-Sonoma and ordered a whole 4-pack of replicas.

Only when the new set arrived, I noticed something was off. The new version of the product isn’t the same. The color is more white, less creamy. The rustic design looks slightly more flat, like it was printed with fewer colors on the machine. When I flip the bowl over, it doesn’t even have a crackle motif printed on the bottom side.

Williams-Sonoma made a shittier version of the original and now they’re marketing it under the same name for the same price.

Enshittification!

It’s happening all around us, and we’ve been talking about it for years. It’s things like:

• J.Crew reducing the quality of their cashmere sweaters
• Google Search no longer returning relevant results
• ChatGPT when the prompt that worked before doesn’t work today

It’s the pub in my neighborhood that used to serve a perfectly elegant smashburger. They recently streamlined ingredients across their menu and now the burger comes with liquid beer cheese instead of a slice of American. Inedible.

Or, the way I pre-scheduled a Lyft ride for date night only to open the app and realize the driver for my planned Trip was running 20 minutes late. What gives?!

We also find enshittification in the software we use every day.

It’s the onslaught of tool-tips in your way when you’re trying to quickly complete a task. The unsubscribe link that doesn’t work. The Remember Me checkbox on the sign in page that never seems to stick. The major email client that shipped a fuzzy icon set.

At work and in our lives at home, it’s not just more expensive or inconvenient to buy higher quality things. The higher quality things do not exist on the market. Craft is dead.

We are all too busy or too overwhelmed or too nihilistic to care about the quality bar as it sinks further and further into the floor, like a dumbbell left too long on a styrofoam mat.

This is not an inspiring environment!

We’ve swung so far in the opposite direction of perfectionism, we’re all zombie-footing around in a landscape of cheap, ubiquitous trash. A clumsy cardboard diorama version of reality when we’re collectively capable of building cathedrals.

So, now what?

I’m not saying we should let go of the concept of an MVP or become paralyzed by mistakes. It’s still better to ship and iterate than to ship nothing at all. Lord knows I’ve got enough open bugs on my own websites right now.

But we need to stop tolerating garbage when we know we can have better.

We need to start expecting more of ourselves and others. We need to return to the pursuit of excellence, celebrating the great handiwork of our peers. We need to insist on incremental improvements AND big leaps forward.

We need to get curious about why something is getting worse and provide useful feedback to businesses when we can!

In the spirit of this, I decided I’d write in to Williams-Sonoma. I brute-forced past their website’s AI helpbot and reached a Live Agent on the other end.

In this moment I had an unsettling thought. What if my 2017 Rustic Melamine Bowl was so old that the original was showing REAL patina ON TOP of the fake patina?

What if it never had a crackle print on the bottom, but rather the difference I noticed in the design of the new product vs. the old was the result of genuine wear and tear, countless turns through the dishwasher?

I poked around on eBay looking for clues. There were so many variations of these bowls in different sizes, shapes, and colors. It was difficult to find a perfect match and most listings didn’t include photographs of the undersides or their maker’s marks.

So, instead of complaining about the “inferior” product, I asked a question instead. Was there ever a more detailed design for this Rustic Melamine Bowl in the past?

The Live Agent on the customer care chat expressed regret she couldn’t be more helpful. It’s likely the vendors changed over the years. She didn’t have access to design specs for the 2017 SKU.

Now the only way I can solve this mystery is to keep using my new bowls with the same loving recklessness I afforded their ancestor.

If I’m lucky, in 8 years time, I may find myself with a matching 5-piece set, each piece more beautiful than the last.