Not your imagination: from backpacks to food, consumer goods are getting worse

When Keyana Sapp, 31, went shopping for a new backpack, the brands he remembered as a kid were just not the same.

He researched the companies, from North Face to JanSport and Eastpak, and soon realized they were all owned by the VF Corporation after a wave of acquisitions in the 2000s. After a Reddit post he made about his discovery picked up traction, he started looking at other types of consumer goods – cookware, shoes, tools, clothing.

“It seems like that was a story that just repeated in every industry,” Sapp told the Guardian.

Big conglomerates and private equity were buying up “trusted brands and riding that reputation out until it was a husk of what it was”.

From a zipper jam on a nearly new coat to a casserole dish cracking in the oven on its third use, Americans are finding that the quality of many once-beloved name brands are declining. Three-quarters of Americans had a quality or service issue in 2025, the National Consumer Rage Study found, double the rate since the survey started in 1976. And customer complaints have reached record levels, according to the latest University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index.

Sapp channeled his personal frustration into building a database of hundreds of brands and ranking them “approved” to “avoid” based in part by their corporate ownership. And as part of his publication, Worse on Purpose, he explains the financial transactions that have undercut the quality of some of the biggest name brands.

Sapp sees a structural problem within the consumer retail industry: founders who built brands they love take lucrative offers from big corporations or private equity investors. While they cash in on the decades it took to build their product’s brand, the new corporate owners eventually prove they don’t have the same emotional investment and are distanced from loyal customers.

“When you’re running everything from an office building that has no relation to where the product is manufactured and people who are doing the manufacturing”, quality is going to suffer, Sapp said.

Big US companies haven’t always been associated with lower-quality products, of course. Purchasing a product from a well-known national brand was often associated with guaranteed quality and consistent customer service for much of the last century.

But in recent years, investors have become increasingly “big and powerful” due to the pro-shareholder rights movement and the growth of large institutional investors, explains Dorothy Lund, a law professor at Columbia University. That increased shareholder power can contribute to consumer harm.

Thanks to activist investors, many company executives face what feels like “gun-to-the-head pressure to maximize shareholder returns”, or be fired, she said.

Shareholder activism targeting CEOs has more than quadrupled since 2018, a December 2025 report by the Conference Board found. Consumer-facing industries have seen “particularly large spikes” in shareholder campaigns that focus on making sure investors get more money.

Meanwhile, corporate profits hit an all-time high in the first quarter of 2025, of $3.9tn on an annualized basis.

Some brand owners who have sold their companies to big corporations say it’s this relentless pressure to increase profits that intrinsically erodes product quality.

“I don’t believe in this idea that you take a sliver off the loaf of baloney and nobody realizes it … and then the next year you take another sliver off, nobody realizes it,” Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Ben Cohen told the Guardian in a recent interview. Cohen is fighting to buy his brand back from Magnum, the ice-cream brand sprung out of Unilever, among disagreements over the brand’s social activism.

“You keep on doing that, year after year, and all of a sudden, you don’t have any baloney” any more, he added.

The news industry in the US used to hold corporations more accountable for the quality of their products and service. But consumer-facing business news was decimated when local newspapers disappeared and national news outlets shifted their corporate coverage to focus on investors.

Recently, a fresh crop of apps and websites, like Worse on Purpose, are taking their place.

The progressive non-profit More Perfect Union has detailed the impact on food quality as restaurant supplier Sysco grew through acquisitions, for example, and the Buy’r blog and app tracks the ownership of food and health and beauty brands. Earlier this month, the New York Times’ Wirecutter mapped the changing ingredients, and taste, of Talenti gelato, after its 2012 takeover by Unilever.

Meanwhile, the Reddit group Enshittification, named after tech critic Cory Doctorow’s term for internet decline, has been a clearinghouse for consumers to rant about products and services getting worse since it was started in 2023.

So what’s an irate shopper to do? Buy from small companies where possible, Sapp suggests.

“The easiest thing any consumer can do is just say, ‘Wherever I can, I’m going to buy independent, rather than from a big conglomerate,’” Sapp recommends. When you’re shopping, “just check who owns the company”.

The Guardian is exploring Americans’ frustrations with big companies and how consumer rights have changed in the world’s biggest consumer economy. Disappointed with a product or service, or have a solution to recommend? Get in touch at Consumed@theGuardian.com.