So like does your product have to be shit to become "global" in the US? Like I know I can get good candy and good food at ethnic stores, bodegas, regional chains or even specific statewide stores - but why is it that all the US food products that "make it big" enough to export all taste like unfettered ass?
Logistics. Best example of it is McDonalds. McDonald’s sucks, but it tastes exactly the same basically everywhere. Being able to pump out cheap slop efficiently allows you to expand way faster than quality does.
Thing is... Not in Europe? I mean, European McDonald's is pretty solid, meat tastes fine since it has to be locally sourced, same with taters. But then I tried American McDonald's and uh, yikes
I guess it's the same across the US for the sake of logistics but then these brands make better products for European markets due to EU nutritional demands, legislation, etc. and their EU franchises produce higher quality stuff - so they could totally sell the same high quality products in the US and still make a profit... But why don't they?
Is it really worth cutting every little corner and serve the absolute bare minimum of acceptability?
I don't know how things are in European countries, but in the United States, the leadership of publically traded companies have a legal repsonsibility to maximize profits to shareholders - 'fiduciary responsiblity'. This has resulted in corporations that will, given the option, always choose profit over everything else; reputation, product safety, longevity, sustainability, it all gets burned at the stake of short-term profits.
It really got accelerated in the modern era thanks to consulting firms like McKinsey popping up and essentially encouraging this behavior as a way to maximize shareholder value in the short-term. To the point that, in the eyes of many shareholders (especially big conglomerates that manage average citizens' investments, mutual funds and retirement funds and the like), there is no value in anything other than pumping the value as high as possible so they can then sell the stock and buy elsewhere before the crash happens.
It's terrible and awful but makes people money so nothing will change.
They do have a fiduciary duty to shareholders but that doesn’t mean they have to always choose profit. They can easily say we aren’t going to make a shit product because we think a good product will make the business more durable. Or we are going to pay a little more than market because we want our pick of the best employees and want them to be bought in.
Just about the only thing they can’t do is say “we gave $400m away because we just felt like it, we have no plan for how we would recoup that”.
The shareholders, in the US, will depose a CEO who isn't all-profit all-the-time. Not universally, but when a private equity firm buys up your stock, that's what happens.
It depends on who the shareholders are. People hate on Vanguard but they actually impose non financial goals on companies they get a stake in like environmental goals because they believe that will maximize shareholder value across their portfolio in the long term because we won’t have as bad of a climate apocalypse
Most shareholders only care about quarterly profits. You don't get to invest for the future unless you're a unicorn startup. Then you get to bleed red for years while you take over the market. Amazon did that.
That’s just not the case for most companies. And that’s different from saying by law companies have to do that or they get sued. Most shareholders want a durable and long-lasting business.
Hatchet job private equity firms want to exfiltrate as much profit as they can from the company and don’t care about durability, sure I’m not saying that doesn’t happen. But the notion that by law you have to relentlessly pursue short-sighted profit, or that all shareholders force companies to maximize next quarter is way overstated.
I mean my god, just look at Take Two. How long did they let rockstar cook with GTAVI?
You haven't been there for a while because burger king bought them 10 years ago 😅. Edit: wow they actually didn't convert all the Quick restaurants so they still exist! In my neck of the wood they all disappeared a long time ago.
In order to get an accurate read on this you'd have to normalize for local food laws and price for raw materials.
I can accept that you don't have a taste for it, but to say that means it's immediately lower quality is a bit of a leap. Food tastesndifferent depending on where it was raised/grown.
Mexican that has traveled across several countries and like...
Thats not my experience ? due to scheduling for flights trains and stuff I have eaten mcdonalds in almost every country I've travelled through and european mcdonalds is as bad as American or South american or even Asian. I had to eat mcdonalds in germany like 3 times and I would even say thats the country I've had it the worse
I know the point you’re making here and I’m not refuting it, but McDonalds does taste different in different countries. I’d actually call the international locations generally better than the domestic.
Scale mostly. The US, despite what many might have you believe also produces a variety of fantastic goods, but we also basically consume all of them and there isn’t a market incentive to ship food goods abroad that often. They already are selling almost all of their goods to one of the highest paying markets anyway, so why go through the trouble of distribution internationally? So instead it’s mostly the massive large scale products that make it abroad.
That's fair. The US is the largest consumer market by a significant margin, it'd little sense for smaller brands to want to compete in markets like Europe for potentially minimal return
Yeah soending more money to break into a smaller market that may additionally have devalued currency making price points difficult to attain, than the one right outside your door is not appealing to many businesses, especially one with quality products that can charge higher prices.
Euro and pound countries have better currency power compared to the dollar, but tariffs and overhead would soak up some of the gains. Plus they tend to spend less than Americans.
Products the US is known for overseas seem to mostly be shelf-stable goods. Those always are lower quality because, they are preserved to last. We're also known for our fast food brands: Mc Donalds, KFC, etc. Those are also low quality because, well, what else do you expect of food made literally as cheaply as possible?
On the other hand, I struggle to remember a time I've pulled something off the shelf of a US store that were as awful as some of the stuff I've bought at Aldi and Coop in France.
Lived in the US before moving to Europe and disagree tbh. There are some hidden local products from farms and things that are great and totally inaccessible to 99.9% of the population. Shrimp powder for making gumbo you can only get in Louisiana, a few things like that.
Everything else is shit. Even the fruit and veg are shit. I don't think GMO is going to give me the transitis or whatever, but if you get the chance try a real farm blueberry versus the blueberries that are the only ones available at every store (produced by the same megacompany occasionally laundered through other names). The non-farm ones are huge and taste pretty much like blueberry flavored water in comparison.
Most of them didn't start that way. They made good products, became popular, then started cutting every corner humanly possible to lower cost of production in order to maximize profits, turning the product into garbage, but maintaining some brand recognition while also staving off more expensive and higher quality competition.
Short answer: Capitalism. Long answer is quality takes time and ingredients whereas it's faster and cheaper to churn slop and people will pay for it. AI art is honestly just the extension of what we've always settled for, just now we can see tangible differences.
Traditionally Americans favored consistency over quality. Historically in food production some amount of average quality needed to be sacrificed to ensure high consistency.
Millennials as a market force have kind have broken this trend, hence the "Millennials are killing Applebee's" meme or the association of millennials with craft beer. American corporate restaurant chains like Applebee's serve bad food, but the entire experience will be identical in every location. Budweiser tastes like piss, but every can will taste and feel identical.
Not for franchises, I’ve heard countless times people saying “I go to McDonalds because I know what I’m getting.” Or Starbucks or whatever. Consistency is a huge deal.
That would be a pretty convenient excuse for Applebee’s making such shitty food. The reality is that they consistently make pretty awful food, plenty of chains have the same quality restrictions that still make food that’s at least edible
I actually liked their Mac and cheese and honey pepper chicken.
Then they made it smaller.
Then they made it more expensive.
Then they made it smaller again.
Now it's basically 3 chicken fries and half the Mac and cheese for $4 more per plate. I'm all good, haven't ordered it in years because of that.
Enshitification, they start with a good or at least mid product until everyone knows the name, then slowly decrease the quality. Become a monopoly and buy up most of the other candies so all candy tastes a similar amount of gross. Lobby the government (because in America corporations are people when it comes to political donations but not taking responsibility for their crimes) so that there will never bean ounce of food oversight. Pay grocery stores for prime space (not certain about this for candy but energy drinks do this) so that all the available space is taken up by your brand.
Because quality and volume rarely go hand in hand. The more of something you produce and sell, the more profitable it becomes to invest in cutting corners; the more it becomes a numbers game rather than a recipe.
Most of them don't start out as shit. Not saying they're all the greatest quality at the start, but Hershey's chocolate now isn't Hershey's chocolate decades ago
But basically, they keep growing in size and popularity; however, at some point the growth rate slows down substantially, but profits can't possible slow down in their growth rate. So now they have to come up with other ways to boost their profits, and unfortunately, too often that means cutting corners wherever possible so the product is cheaper to make, counting on the already established popularity to keep people buying an interior product.
It's enshittification all the way down. A product starts out good. But once they become a large company it's a ticking clock, because their market control means they can sell dogshit and people will eat it. If someone tries to make a good product to compete the moment they start to actually matter they got bought out for more money than anyone would turn down. If they have principles (bizarre) then they are absolutely destroyed through other methods like weaponizing the legal system or playing "I'm not touching you" with harassment and getting away with it because they buy politicians.
The big brands take the brand name and enshittify the product again.
Four companies control 80% of US supermarket food. Ten companies control basically all of it, like 99.9%.
McDonald's is global. It's about what's cheap, consistent, and popular in other markets, and most importantly if you can source it locally for manufacturing or ship it as is, that's why lots of processed foods are in global markets whereas other foods from America people have never heard of. Company can't ship, manufacture overseas, or there isn't a market for it.
And failing in an international market is a huge deal. It costs a lot of money to expand overseas. If the company is small enough (read: not even that small) and you fail you just took hundreds of millions if not billions in losses
You don't have to go to special stores to get good stuff. National grocery chains have good chocolate.
But the reason products like this made it big pretty much boiled down to price and shelf stability. They came up with products that were much cheaper than alternatives and gave people an affordable treat, even if it wasn't the higest quality. Especially when the great depression and then WW2 rationing came around, that affordability really made them the only option many people could afford as a luxury and the hershey became a staple in the war effort producing chocolate for military rations. This made it a household staple and raised generations of people on it.
It's objectively not quality, but many people were raised eating it and it remains popular partially due to it being an important cultural icon. If no one had ever heard of it before and were to blind taste hershey vs a better milk chocolate, I seriously doubt anyone would pick it as the best. But it's familiar, it's cheaper than the alternatives, and people grew up on it so they like the taste.
America has food laws, set requirements, and enforced them. There are many things allowed in Europe banned in America and vice versa. It is simply that America has different priorities and expectations.
Just because European countries tend to do it some way does not mean that is the only way or the most optimal way for all countries.
Bro this is reddit. America bad. Get on the band wagon. Coming from an American quite tired of being shit on by all these high and mighty euros who live in utopias according to them. Or the projection is real idfk
Shitty tasting candy isn’t a result of food laws it’s a result of millions of American soldiers getting a sweet tooth for the rations we gave them when you guys got a little too rowdy in the 40s and tried to evaporate several million people.
Hershey’s is bottom of the barrel slop for poors. See’s would be the US version of quality chocolate in a large ish chain. Some candy makers on the coasts are good too, but they tend to boast about their taffy.(a lot are also outsourcing to shit candy makers now)
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u/apixelops 6h ago
So like does your product have to be shit to become "global" in the US? Like I know I can get good candy and good food at ethnic stores, bodegas, regional chains or even specific statewide stores - but why is it that all the US food products that "make it big" enough to export all taste like unfettered ass?