There was a time when we thought GE made everything really great. No we avoid the brand like the plague, in the past 25 years or so everything GE made didn’t last as long as Sony or other brands. Even the GE message machine was useless.
Cuisinart blenders. Can’t handle anything even slightly thick without struggling and stripping the belts inside. I don’t like the smell of burning rubber with my smoothie.
This also goes for most belt-driven motor crap nowadays. If your load is too heavy, the machine should always stop as its first means of letting you know it can’t do the job, not struggle shudder and smoke. A simple stop is usually non-damaging, might need a simple kick to get it going again. The smoky squealy slow death spasm is just damaging the belts and shortening the life of the machine.
I almost hate to second this, but you’re right, they’ve made some kind of quantum leap in quality in the last 5-7 years. And their “restaurants” have been getting better, too.
Who will we make jokes about, now? 
And WTH happened with the fruit flavors? The peach and cherry vanilla used to be my favorites! Now they’re some weird “dairy dessert” concoction that has a weird mouthfeel.
The upside of this is that I’ve started making my own ice cream, so I know what’s going into it…
I used to wear nothing but New Balance shoes, because I have wide feet, and they were the only sneaker brand that came in widths. But when I did a lot of walking, especially when hiking on vacations, I’d get horrible blisters. I’d travel with lots of Moleskin, and even that wasn’t enough.
Then I found out about Merrells. I bought a pair of hiking shoes that were both waterproof and ventilated. I wear them every single day, unless I need something dressy, which is rare. No more New Balance, no more blisters, and no more Moleskin.
I should probably have specified “Ernie Ball strings, but only for electric, and only the Slinky series.” 
Can you explain how you use this? Are we talking washboard here?
Walmart.
Any product over $15 dollars have been returned or exchanged at least once due to a defect. If not not outright returned, it wears out faster than “normal wear and tear ought”, clothing especially. Unfortunately, it is usually the only thing open (24 hours), when I have the time to buy things, but I limit myself to smaller purchases now. Major purchases come from elsewhere.
Yahoo! Brand free web-based e-mail service.
I’ve seen all the endless reams of on-line user commentary about how gawd-awful it’s gotten, and I’ve seen the gawd-awful results myself. Every new revision they’ve put out in the last few years has been more unusable than the versions before, to the point that it’s now just plain badly broken.
Little by little, I’ve moved all my e-mail uses to other providers. The preferred provider, however, tries a little too hard to block attachments that might potentially contain malware, even if it’s ensconced inside a file inside a ZIP file. For sending attachments, therefore, I sometimes still use Yahoo although it’s a PITA to use but at least it tends to work for things like that.
Bioware, and every other brand in EA’s clutches. I will not give money to EA, because the only way EA will ever stop being immoral dickbags and killing brands I liked is if their company starves to death.
Games Workshop, because I got sick and tired of waiting for them to give my favourite army any support. Even three years ago, I would have come back, but since then they’ve burnt so many bridges that short of decapitating their chain of command and putting someone decent in charge, they’d be so expensive that I wouldn’t buy them anyway.
Count me in on the Reebok disenchantment. I used to buy a new pair every year and wear them to work daily. I figured I’d be wearing Reeboks for the rest of my life. Ha! That last pair I bought disintegrated well before the allotted year was up.
For a while, I switched my brand allegiance to Rockport, since they made a very similar walking shoe. They were fine for a few years; then I made the mistake of ordering a pair online. I got a pair of bricks in the shape of shoes. I wore them for a while thinking they’d “break in.” No such luck. I’m done with Rockport, too.
I’m about ready to give up on my Etonic walkers. I also have wide feet, and Etonic made wide sizes. Further, they came in black leather, so when occasion demanded, I could often wear my Etonics in place of foot-squeezing, uncomfortable gentleman’s dress shoes.
But the quality that was once there is now gone. A pair of Etonics I bought ten years ago looks like it’s ten years old and may now be fine only for yard work and snow shoveling, but it still looks better than my one-year-old pair of Etonics that basically split apart.
McDonald’s coffee has certainly improved by several orders of magnitude. In years past, I’d sooner drink heated mop water than coffee from McDonalds. Now, I’d stop there before I went to Starbucks.
Agreed 100%. My first pair of Docs were some black 8-hole boots I bought back in the year 2000 or so. I just wore them to a wedding last weekend, nearly a decade and a half later…they still look and feel great…a new pair of laces now and again is all they need.
A few years after I bought those, I found a great clearance deal on zappos.com for some side-zipper Doc boots. I bought a pair in black and a pair in brown…and the soles on both started peeling off after a couple of years. Turns out this was when they made the manufacturing switch to China (or wherever) and the cheap soles are just glued on and not stitched or whatever they do with the good ones. I keep telling myself I’ll take them in and get them fixed at a shoe repair place, but I never do…I just keep wearing the old, perfect 8-hole boots.
Sad to see it happen…I would rather they just increased the price but kept making good stuff rather than pawning off cheap garbage as “Dr. Martens.” They’ve turned people off and now nobody wants to pay the premium for the “vintage” line to get the real deal again because they’ve already been burned.
Since you brought it up, their sweet ice tea is the best on the planet (better than my mom’s [sorry, mom]), and most times a buck for the biggest cup you can haul, and FREE REFILLS, too.
I have to second this opinion. I’m not sure as to the details. But some time ago, I noticed a big change in Breyer’s ice cream. It was a very big bad change. Their ice cream suddenly became terrible and I could not ever buy it again. I didn’t understand why and I still don’t. But I’m thinking that maybe someone along the line found a way to make a whole pile of money but cutting out some quality ingredients and substituting some crapola. That is at least what my taste buds done told me and I never wanted to go back for more.
Screw you Breyers! People like you make the consumer world a real bad place.
But, I’m happy - very happy - to learn there was something to my experience and that I voted against this product with my wallet (so to speak) and never spent another dime on this crappy crap!
Too bad. so sad!
Oh yes indeed! All I know about them is that I suddenly discovered by myself that Western Digital was now the finest HD available - both internal and external. So, I stopped buying any other brand - including shitty Seagate - and I then became a much happier consumer.
But the important question for me is why. Why did I have to discover these changes (both Seagate and Breyer’s ice cream, entirely on my own)? I would have thought that many people would have learned about these changes in some trade magazine and then it would have been made well known over the Internet.
IMHO, that is the one excellent thing about the Internet. It is used and should be used to allow consumers to talk to each other in places exactly like this one and help us to learn about these changes so that we can then switch our purchasing power away from crappy services and products and instead, begin to purchase good quality services and products.
But, it is much more important than that. It’s not just about the quality of the stuff. It’s about what has happened to the people who run these companies. If they decide their customers are no longer important and they can just go and F themselves, that is something that I would want to know ASAP so that I can help spread the word and help others to make appropriate changes. With any luck, that should drive people who have decided to stop caring about their customers right out of business.
I want to make my way through a consumer world where people quickly learn about changes - all kinds of changes - both with the quality of products and services as well as the attitudes of the people who run these companies. I want to see companies that no longer care about their customers to be out of business right quick!
It’s not good enough for them to lumber and stumble for several months or years before they go out of business. I want to see them gone quickly. Especially those bastards who stop porviding quality to their customers and when we complain, they tell us to “Piss Off”. I want those bastards gone. I don’t want them to carry on taking money from people when they clearly do not deserve it.
I have a stong desire to see the Net and boards like this working together to quickly provide people with good info and to quickly shut down companies that no longer provide quality to their customers. This board does a good job in helping to make the overall process quite efficient. But we could be doing a whole heck of a lot better.
By the way, IMO this is a real great thread and I want to say a big thank you to the OP - Penfeather. Thanks a bunch! A big hearty bunch!
I would guess they had to improve in order to compete with Tim Horton’s. Lots of people complain about Corporations and competition and there is much merit to what they say.
But if I am correct as to the reason the quality has improved, then this would be one case where competition really did work for us - at least, I hope it did.
Jif Peanut Butter. Not because of quality control issues, but because I couldn’t stop eating it and it was hindering my weight-loss efforts. So I gave it up, cold turkey.
It’s been hard…
You are a brave and noble man, JohnT.