I have no empirical evidence of this to present, but if you view every transaction as existing on some scale of scam-iness, where one side is you lose your house and wife and kids and the other is an amazing deal for you, the average position on that scale has shifted toward the backside pretty much the entirety of my life. Anything that comes to me first, I pretty much always write off as a scam. Email from someone I don't know? Scam. Car dearlership advertising 0% APR for 5 years on a brand new car? Scam. Even something like my workplace offering a new optional benefit - probably a scam. Did things always feel like this?
My perception is that people always felt like car dealers were scamming them.
BUT people saw opportunity in the big things: education, housing, reward for good work. This is the part that has unraveled. Even public universities are out of reach for much of the middle class (this was not the case as recently as the '70s). We have systematically under built housing for 2 generations, so our job centers are ridiculously expensive. And our business culture has largely de-linked performance and job stability so that well-performing people routinely get laid off for even when their firms are doing well.
It's worth noting here that all of these are enabled by deliberate policy changes that have been enacted since the 1980s.
I wonder about this, too. What were things like in, say, the 1960s? When you went to buy a new appliance, did you feel like the appliance was designed to intentionally screw you as much as possible via planned obsolescence, anti-consumer-repair measures, purchased "warranties" that had tons of fine print so you could never actually benefit, etc?
Even as a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, I learned that everything was a scam. How many times did child-me watch a TV commercial (on the childrens' channels) that showed a remote-controlled toy car doing extremely cool stunts and riding on rocks and dirt, only to get it for a birthday present and have it not able to move at all unless it was on a totally flat, level, surface? Or, have you ever seen a commercial for a toy like the "Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots"? I'm sure they're on YouTube. Then once you see the toy in person it's pathetic.
I've truly been taught my whole life that everything is a scam.
> When you went to buy a new appliance, did you feel like the appliance was designed to intentionally screw you as much as possible via planned obsolescence
I feel like it's way worse now. We bought our first home in 1990. It was built in 1974. The Whirlpool dishwasher was original from when the house was built. It was harvest gold, but we discovered there were almond and avocado green panels inside the door and you could switch them out if your decor changed, meaning that they were planning for this dishwasher to last a while. In the 20 years we lived there we only had trouble with it once and it turned out that replacing a solenoid was quite easy to do. When we moved to another house we rented that house out. That dishwasher lasted until 2014. A dishwasher that lasts 40 years is unheard of now. Our last dishwasher barely made it 7 years.
Thank you for sharing that experience. It certainly meshes with my suspicions. I'm actually currently experiencing almost the same phenomenon in my house. My refrigerator was here when I moved in five years ago. It has a service sticker on it from 1997! I don't know exactly when this model left the factory, but if it's "only" 28 years old that would mean that things have gotten worse even since the 90s.
The only issue the fridge has had is that one of the defroster heater coils died (it has two- I guess because it's a side-by-side style, so the freezer part is tall). It wasn't very hard to replace. In fact, the hardest part was actually finding the part, itself.
