I Said Everything Sucks Now And These Viewer Comments Prove It
Matt Walsh Show viewers agree: everything is getting worse. Now Matt is responding to your stories about about everything from the state of new construction to video games to the Amish joining in on the slop-fest.
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All right, we're going to take a look at some comments today.
This is one thing we've been talking about on the show.
If you've been watching the show, you know this.
If you haven't been watching the show, then how dare you.
But we've been talking about the decline of everything.
The quality of everything has declined significantly over the past many years, in particular over the last one or two decades.
And a lot of comments about that.
People from various industries have been leaving comments.
They've been writing emails talking about how their perspective on this and what they've seen behind the scenes.
And we're going to go through a few of those today.
Okay.
I fled Minneapolis says, what are the odds that this decline in quality will reverse itself within the next 20 years?
It's really depressing to think that the world peaked when I was 12 years old and far too young to really enjoy it or understand it.
Yeah, I think the possibility that it reverses itself within the next 20 years is pretty low, unfortunately.
So you're kind of screwed.
Well, you're not entirely screwed up.
Well, there's a couple of things.
Number one, you say reverse itself.
Well, that's never going to happen, right?
So the collapse in the quality of everything is not ever going to reverse itself.
It's not going to ever just magically get better, right?
When you say reverse itself, it sounds like something that will happen on its own.
That's not going to happen.
Can it be reversed?
Can we see in all of these various different industries a re-emphasis on quality?
Yes, that can happen.
That will hopefully eventually happen.
Now, the reason why I'm skeptical about the next 20 years is that these things happen slowly over time.
And it took us many decades to get to the point where we are now, which means that I think logically it will probably take many decades to get out of it.
And part of that is going to be, it's like it's on us, right?
People need to make decisions.
And that means that the companies that are in, whether we're talking about construction or home appliances or restaurants, right?
We could put the blame on the corporations and the companies, and they deserve a fair amount of it.
It also goes to consumers too.
Like we as consumers have to make different choices.
We have to stop rewarding.
We have to stop consuming slop.
We have to stop being so easily satisfied.
And so a lot of that's going to come to us.
Everybody complains about another area of decline, movies, films, TV shows, streaming services, right?
We've talked about this.
The streaming services are getting more and more expensive.
The quality of the service is going down.
They're adding ads to everything even after you pay for the subscription.
And then the original content that they're churning out sucks.
And so we all complain about that.
But then what do we do?
Most people, they still go get the subscriptions.
Most people have, who knows?
Like you lose track of how many subscriptions you have.
So you still sign up for this stuff.
You don't have to.
It's not like it's a need in our lives.
If you really feel like Netflix is putting out slop, you could just not pay for Netflix.
There's like a huge number of people, a huge number, probably millions of people who pay for that service and don't even like it and yet continue to pay for it.
So a lot of that's going to come down to the choices that we make.
All right, Jason Rose says, the state of gaming is trash.
Games peaked a few years ago.
Now all we get is rushed slop from lazy formulaic developers.
And in the rare event, a good game is made, a game that reminds players and development teams that you don't have to cut corners and make everything gay.
It gets pilloried by every other developer and gaming activist for the simple fact that gamers got a small reminder of how things could of how things could be again.
I've heard a lot of this as we've talked about the quality decline, the shockation, the engine Everything.
I've heard this a lot from gamers saying that, you know, gaming is, this has also happened with games.
I've talked about how I think movies and films peaked from like 2006 to 2008.
It was a very, almost a specific time you could point to.
Like that was the peak.
2006, 2008 was the peak, and then the peak of the peak was 2007.
And what I've heard from people who play video games is that that was also the peak right then around that timeframe, the peak of video games, which is very interesting to me.
It's very interesting because video games are such a new art form, right?
It's not like films.
Films have been around for 100 years.
But video games are so new, relatively speaking.
And so the fact that they've peaked, yet they're so new, is also an interesting fact.
And that is something that I would look into and probably talk more about.
But the last time that I tried to speak in depth about something that was happening in the video game world, I got ripped to shreds for it.
And not even because people disagreed, but because they said they agreed, actually.
I was talking about wokeness in video games.
And it was just based on the research I'd done about it.
Not claiming I had any personal experience with it or not claiming I was a big gamer.
Everybody knows I'm not, but I'm capable of like reading articles.
And so I did and said, oh, this is, you know, here's a thing that's happening.
And I got ripped to shreds for it by people who agreed about the wokeness of video games, but they said that I should not be talking about it.
They said, how dare you?
They said, get video games' names out of your mouth.
Get their name out of your mouth.
And that's what they said to me.
So, and then I always have to think, well, do I, okay, so if I talk about it, this is going to be the reaction.
I talk about a lot of things where that's the reaction.
It's fine.
Do I care enough to deal with that headache?
When it comes to video games, no.
So I'll let other people discuss the decline in video games.
Although it would be just, it would be like me to become a gamer now out of spite.
I did think about that too.
When this dumb controversy happened several months ago and everyone was mad at me just for talking about video games, one of the dumbest controversies I've ever been, I've been involved in a lot of them.
That might be the dumbest of all time.
And I did think about, you know what, just out of spite now, I'm going to start, I'm going to become a big gamer.
I'm going to start playing video games nine hours a day, just at a spite.
But I didn't.
The Canimal says, on the topics of food quality, the topic of food quality, I'm a small farmer who operates a lot of my business at farmers markets.
I've noticed some vegetable farms will show up with produce that's out of season or can't be grown in our region.
Yet the implication of being in a farmer's market is to trick consumers that it's local simply by being there.
Even some Amish businesses will do this.
So the shitification has even hit the Amish.
That's how you know it's bad when it's even hit the Amish.
And I've noticed this too.
You know, I enjoy a farmer's market on occasion as any white person does.
And I've noticed this a little bit also, that you see these, now farmers market has become its own kind of like brand.
And so you go there and things are marked up and you find a lot of great stuff, but you also find, as you say, you find things that this is not fresh.
This is not local, but it just has the farmer's market brand.
It's the same thing that's happened with organic.
You know, organic doesn't mean anything.
Like it does not mean anything anymore.
It's just branding.
And it's an excuse to mark up the price, even if the quality is not any better.
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I'll take one more.
It says, decided to go to an indoor mall to do Christmas shopping for the first time in several years.
Thought I'd get out and not purchase everything inline this year.
Online, I guess is what you mean, not purchase everything online this year.
Went into a foot locker.
I was only, I was the only customer.
Selected a shoe from display shelf and was approached by a young female employee who asked if I needed anything.
Asked if she could see if they had a shoe in a certain size.
She looked at me befuddled and suggested I download the store app and I could check myself.
Explain not something I wanted to do.
And was she unable to check for me?
She said that she could, but looked irritated.
I walked with her across the store and she checked with another employee who confirmed he got the shoes from the back.
She then directed me to go put the shoe back on the rack.
Not a big deal, but I think I would have taken that responsibility from the customer.
Anyway, pretty odd experience.
Definitely a customer service decline.
Seemed like it was a standard procedure at that store.
Shoes weren't cheap either.
Entire mall was pretty empty.
Lots of store clothes.
Pretty sad.
Yeah.
Well, when you talk about decline, customer service is right there at the tip of the iceberg.
And it's gotten so bad, there's no question about it.
This thing of going to a store and they tell you to check for something online, I hate that.
Happens all the time now.
Very little of this started with COVID and the COVID lockdowns, but as we know, the COVID lockdowns made a lot of it worse.
This is one thing that did seem to start there, where I can remember, I remember going into a Chipotle at like the height of the lockdowns.
And I guess this happened a lot.
I mean, depending on where you live, maybe this was standard operating procedure.
But I hadn't run into it until this moment.
I walked into a Chipotle to order food and they were standing right there on the other side of the counter.
And I said, yeah, can I order the burrito?
And they said, oh, you got to order it online.
You got to get the app and order it online.
And I said, I'm standing right like the food is right there and you are right there and I'm right here and I'm speaking to you.
Can I just audibly tell you what I want from the, can you just do that?
And they said, no, you got to put it on in the app.
So you want me to plug it into the app so that you can then look at what I plugged in and then make what I and so that was the thing that started with COVID lockdowns.
It's not that bad anymore, but there's vestiges of that that have remained and it will probably remain forever where they want you to even things they could do, they say they want you to do it online.
And the thing with customer service is that, so if someone's going to give you good service, right, if you're going to go to a place and you're going to get good service, there's like two things that would motivate someone to deliver good service.
And one is that they take a real pride in their job.
They're really proud of it.
So they take pride in their craft, right?
And then the other is that they're incentivized, that they have a real incentive to deliver good service.
So if you have either of those things, if you're dealing with someone who's incentivized to give good service, then you'll probably get decent service.
Even if they're not directly financially incentivized, if they just take pride in what they do, then you'll get good service.
If both of those things are in play, they're taking pride in it.
They're also incentivized, then you'll get great service.
Well, the problem is you walk into these places now and neither of those are in play.
You're dealing with people, they take no pride in what they're doing at all.
And which you can kind of understand.
If you go into a Walmart and it's like a minimum wage employee and they work at cash register, they're stocking shelves.
I mean, you should take pride in anything you do.
That's how I was raised.
Like whatever you're doing, no matter what you're doing, right?
If you're, like, my parents would tell me, you got to go vacuum the rug.
You should take pride.
You should take pride in doing it well.
Even if you don't care about it, it's your responsibility.
And you should just, in general, it's a matter of character.
It's a matter of forming good habits and becoming a successful person is taking pride in everything you do.
So you should take pride in everything you do.
But it can be hard when it's something mundane and you're not being paid well.
And you're in one of these big box stores and you're under fluorescent lights all day and you're dealing with these dead-eyed customers who are there and don't care about you and you don't care about them.
It's like it's hard to take pride in that, although you still should.
So that's not in play.
Then also there's really no incentive.
Like you're dealing with these customer service representatives who, if they deliver good service to you, they're not going to get any benefit from that.
And if they deliver bad service to you, it's not going to hurt them.
They're not going to get fired for just like your standard service.
And even if they give great service, they're not going to be rewarded for it at the moment.
There is an incentive, but it's a little bit, it's a longer term.
If you're really good customer service, you're delivering great service.
Then you could kind of climb up the ladder.
Maybe you get promoted.
That could still happen.
But there's no in the moment incentive for it.
And so with those two factors out of the way, it means that, yeah, you're dealing with people not incentivized to give good service, not taking any pride in the work.
And then you end up with exactly what you're talking about at Foot Locker or anywhere else.
These customer service representatives who actively hate you just for being there.
Worst case scenario is going into a place, one of these big box stores, or this is not a big, you know, you're talking about Foot Locker, but one of these retail places and actually needing some kind of help.
That's when you know you're screwed.
I went, I think I said this on the show last year.
I went to Walmart around like around the same time.
And I was getting, oh, it was an electric scooter for my kids for Christmas.
And so you had to go back to that section of the store and then everything, as is so often the case these days, especially these kind of high dollar items, they're locked behind glass.
And I just knew, I knew this was going to be a thing.
So like now I got to go back into this section of the store where it's not, they don't have a specific employee for this section probably.
And I'm going to get, I have to find someone to open the glass.
This is going to, this is going to be a thing now because I need a little bit of help.
I'm going to need to find someone in this store who is motivated to help me.
And it's going to be a problem and I know it.
And sure enough, it took almost an hour to find someone who would just open the glass so that I could buy the thing.
That's the way it goes now.
Red Nikki 9 says, bakery frosting and vacuum cleaners.
I'm a caregiver now and I've worked for people in their 80s who still have their old metal Kirby vacuum cleaners, which still work.
The wheels are a little rusty, a little harder to push, but they can be greased up or something with some WD-40.
They're repairable, unlike the vacuum cleaners I buy nowadays, where if you even own a dog and a cat and vacuum up the tiniest bit of fur or tiny little bits of cat litter, vacuum cleaner breaks and everybody and you got to buy a new one every year or two.
As for bakery frosting, I was a cake directorator 20 years ago at Safeway and at Fred Meyers.
We made our own buttercream icing, which was delicious.
Then about 10 years later, all the icing gets shipped in plastic buckets.
And I'm not exaggerating when I say that frosting smells like plastic sugar and grosses you out every time you have to open one of those buckets.
We've had tons of customer complaints about the quality of the frosting when I worked there.
The last good bakery I worked at where things were homemade was in a small town in Idaho where the bakers still actually bake the cakes.
Something that was not happening at Safewater or Fred Meyer.
And they still made their own frosting.
The case tastes so good that even in that tiny town, one-tenth of the size of the town where I worked in Safeway Bakeries, the cakes would sell just as fast.
I'm wondering if a lot of people at home are just going back to baking their own cakes.
All you need is to look at the picture of the cakes they sell at the big grocery chain stores, watch some YouTube videos, and practice with icing to make the flowers and decorations with real icing.
Yeah, this is why it's interesting to read these comments because there's all these little things.
We talk about the decline in quality, there's all these little things that you don't, this has impacted us in big ways that we all notice.
But it's also these little things that really add up and that you don't think about.
Icing on cakes.
Most people, you don't think about that when you think about the shittification of everything.
But now that you mention it, that's true.
This is one of the reasons why, you know, I'm not, like, I can't, I grew up, I was kind of spoiled.
I grew up in a home where we had home-cooked meals every night.
And well, six nights a week, we did Pizza Fridays.
We were really excited about always.
And we could order from any, it was like five pizza places around.
They were all good, not the case anymore.
But I only ever had homemade cakes, like around birthday.
My mom would make a cake and she'd make the icing homemade too.
And that's why I can't eat, like, I can't eat a store-bought cake anymore because, and the icing is just not, it's no good.
Also in this industry, too, grocery goat.
I just bought a new construction house in North Carolina put up this year.
Home inspection revealed three broken trusses and one broken rafter in the attic.
The outside electric meter was never weather sealed.
The anchor bolts securing the house to the foundation slab were installed incorrectly, among other things.
The cheapest vinyl siding imaginable that can be started on modern cars or the medical industry.
Yeah, there's, this is just a representative one little sample.
There's a million comments like this and emails from people talking about, I mean, in construction in particular, this is a major problem that the houses are shoddily built with cheap material.
And that's one of the reasons why, you know, we've moved around a lot.
So we've purchased many different homes, not to own all at the same time, but we own one house at a time.
We just have to move a lot.
And wherever we can, we look for older homes.
We look for the older homes.
And there are problems that come with that.
A lot of people avoid older homes because it needs more maintenance.
You're probably going to need to do some renovations.
There's, you know, the plumbing might be old and all these different things.
The electric might need some work.
But the older homes, one thing you get, number one, is character.
You get the real craftsmanship that went into it.
And so there are all of these, when you go into an older home, a home that was built 100 years ago or farther back than that, there are all these little details that just like don't exist in modern homes at all.
Things you don't even think about.
Again, things you don't even think about, but you walk in and it's beautiful in all these little intricate ways.
Time being put into care being put into every little detail of the house because they wanted to make it not just functional, but also beautiful because they knew that someone's going to be living here.
And so this stuff really matters.
So there's the craftsmanship that goes into it, but also it's durable.
I mean, these were houses that are made with, you know, brick and wood.
They were made with, they're made to last.
They're made to, that's why it's 100 years later and people are still living in it.
And it's, I like to live in a house that has that kind of history behind it.
And then I know that 100 years from now, we will just, we will be part of the history of this house that someone else will live in.
And I think that's a great thing.
So, yeah, houses suck also.
Wow, that was really depressing.
So I'm glad that we could read all those comments.