BW3 Radicalized Me
When I was a kid, BW3 (Buffalo Wild Wings and Weck, later just Buffalo Wild Wings) had it all.
They had every sports game imaginable, including hard to find women's games. They had a little trivia game you could play against other people waiting for their chicken strips. They had pretty good food for a pretty good price, considering the national chain of it all. And service was good, including workers being treated well. (I had a few high school friends who worked part time there.) It was a high school sports nerd paradise.
Over time, trivia moved from a box you got when you sat down onto your phone. Then was outsourced. Then was sunset at most restaurants because of the bugs from lack of maintenance.
They stopped having all the channels, and stuck to major commercial sports. Even as women's sports became easier to find on TV, they got harder to find at BW3.
The staff got treated worse and worse, and every measure was introduced to reduce the amount of wages paid. Now you order with a QR code, and barely talk to the humans who are being worked like table-running robots.
It was the first thing to show me what Cory Doctorow calls 'enshitification'. Anything that can be cut to boost the stock price will be cut, no matter how much it devalues the product.
Capitalism is a system designed to create the worst product that you will still buy.
This was the first thing for me, but there have been a thousand things since. What dumb thing did you love, until it was ruined by capitalism?