It's back to this modern business problem: shareholders demand multiple revenue streams now. You can't just sell food, now you also have to surveil your customers and sell their data, show them ads, and get them into a subscription.
I don't think shareholders really demand anything, most of the time. So much of the market is just passive 401k buckets.
This feels like a pathology of board/C-suite culture, something that they feel like they "have to" do, rather than actual angry letters from Joe Shareholder in Des Moines demanding more user data farming.
At least in the case of United, we did see shareholders write angry letters when they temporarily became slightly less aggressive denying customers coverage. If that's the level of care for matters of life and death, why wouldn't it generalize to surveillance?
To be fair, I think McDonald's makes more money on real estate (renting franchise locations) than they do selling food, and the income from data mining customers would probably be a pittance in comparison to both.
Not that I'd put it past them, but I assume the entire point of the Monopoly campaign is advertising, playing on the nostalgia for the original, and that the app is just there because that's what you do now, you just have an app.
Yes. Most gas stations in the US are self-serve, with screens and buttons next to them. Some are even switching to touch screens. And now some of those screens display ads while you're fueling your car. Hell, some even have sound and it's set at a rather obnoxious volume.
Unfortunately, my local stations are deep enough into the Enshittification Cycle™ that the formerly-functional pump mute buttons have all been disabled. That seems to be the trend among several of the newer gas stations I've visited lately.
That's the line which, when crossed, I immediately boycott and use another gas station indefinitely, but I get the feeling that it's only a matter of time before they all follow suit.
But surely, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” that our late-stage capitalism has so benevolently bequeathed us.
Would it work if we created a crowdsourced vision for each category of product/service, so that any given business would be incentivized to meet these requirements to be able to advertise a product or store is Anti-Enshitified Compliant™?
No more "savey-save fcky-fck" cards/clubs as Bill Burr used to joke. No more apps required just to get a fair price. Get the easily transferable PFAS/PFOA contaminants off of my receipts and food wrappers. The sky is the limit for what we could demand.
Companies/shareholders could choose to comply or not.
