Note that I don’t mean enshittification sensu Cory Doctorow, which is a distinct economic phenomenon. No, I found this funny little bit about the Pillow Guy from Nick Hanauer, a businessman who has been fighting for significant economic reforms, including a national $15/hour minimum wage (boldface mine):

I have founded myself or helped found, I think, around 40 companies. Some of those companies are among the largest companies in the world. As I reflect on my business career, the only product I ever made that was unambiguously good for the world were the pillows that my family business made. We made these really great down pillows. By the way, down feathers are a waste byproduct of the poultry industry—they’re going to throw them away if you don’t turn them into pillows. Basically, it’s cotton, and then you get the feathers and wash them with soap and water—this is a very harmless process—and then you use air to separate the good ones from the bad, and then put them in the pillow and sew it closed. It’s a terrible business in the sense that the margins are very low. But we ended up making these products, both comforters and pillows, that people loved, that lasted decades, and were a great value. When you’re done with your pillow, if you open it up and put the feathers in the garden, it’s all nitrogen and a great natural fertilizer. It couldn’t be a better product for the world. It was a really cool business in that sense.

And then Mike Lindell comes along with this My Pillow thing. I’m just going to tell you a technical detail about being in the television promotion product business: those business models only work if you have a margin of at least 400 percent. In other words, if you can’t find a way to sell the product for at least four to five times what it costs you to make, the math doesn’t work. So, believe you me, I looked a thousand ways at trying to be in that business. The problem is that if you make a good pillow—if you want to make a pillow that will actually work well for humans—you’re going to have to spend in the manufacturing plant in the range of $20 to $30 per pillow, which means they would have to retail it for $120 or something like that, which won’t work. I think his pillows retailed for about $20, which means that it costs him something like two or three or four bucks to make one of those things, and they are a piece of shit…

They’re just a piece of shit. He just grinds up garbage and puts it in cheap fabric and calls it a pillow. That business model was never available to us because we made a product that just wouldn’t survive those margins. Of course, many years ago, when I was thinking about being in that business, it never occurred to me that the same sort of ethic that he applied to his product development would apply to his politics, too. But then, of course, there it is…

Yes, in the same way that his politics are a lie, his product is a lie too.

The greatest con many businessmen, especially the conservative ones (i.e., most of them), ever pulled was convincing people they’re good at business, when most of them, at least the breed of the last couple of decades, are very good wealth-extractors, but they actually suck at their supposed business.

Also, the Pillow Guy is just a motherfucker.