Off Topic - Troubling Observations

As I am sure all of you have noticed, things have changed since COVID came along. I have been observing some disturbing changes. This is what I have noticed.

Here’s what’s missing:

FOOD:
As restaurants reopened, they almost all came back with reduced menus and dropped previous items. What I saw dropped:
McDonalds - salads and wraps
Olive Garden - grilled chicken dinners with veggies and a veggie pasta dish
Chick-Fil-A - the salad that had fruit with it
Taco Bell - taco salad

ORGANIC & NATURAL ITEMS:
Target - no longer sells the Allerease organic unbleached hypoallergenic pillows; their organic sheet collection and other organic items dwindled to nothing. Target used to be a dependable source of a minimal selection of organic goods.

Much harder to find clothing anywhere made of 100% cotton, wool, or silk.

Here’s what is increasing:

CLOTHING & GOODS:
Clothing made of recycled materials like plastic.
Clothing that contains a % of materials only disclosed as “Other.”
Clothing that is more cheaply made than anything I have ever seen sold as New in a retail store. Unhemmed clothing with raw cut edges.
Clothing made of fabrics that look and feel horribly cheap and gross.

EQUIPMENT & OTHER ITEMS:
Brands that no one has ever heard of and knows nothing about. Brands once respected are disappearing. I saw this at Sam’s yesterday in some metal shelving units.

I wonder what the people who worked so hard for decades to increase the availability and demand for organic and natural products are doing now. Surely they have observed what I have. We have also seen power grabs removing availability of natural medicine.

Wondering if others here have noticed what I have, too, and why you think this is happening.

I agree RainyCloud

Thanks China AGAIN.

Sunflower1920 said...
Thanks China AGAIN.

Maybe if we made more things at home, we wouldn't be quite as reliant on other countries and worried about how politics and pandemics might affect our ability to receive goods from them. Plus, of course, our own citizens would have additional jobs.

Instead, corporations shift operations overseas, we lose jobs (possibly pension plans, too), they exploit the foreign workers by paying lower wages (and, those workers are sometimes in unsafe working conditions), the corporations pay little or no taxes on their foreign profits, their stock goes up, and the executives collect multi-million-dollar bonuses and more stock options for favoring their shareholders over their workers.

We're becoming like the people in the 2008 film WALL-E.

Bailey said...
Yeah they really need to fix supply chains for many reasons, economic, national security, human rights, and I’m sure others. I accept that covid created extenuating circumstances, but it also illustrated many weaknesses in our current setup.

Exactly. We're too dependent on one source for to many products. The auto computer chip shortage put a spot light on that one big time.

This is just temporary, its a very long backlog.

Yea that's exactly what I was insuiating. I could go on alittle further but my comments would prob be deleted lol.

I attribute restaurants menus cutting back as simple math. They are not selling as much so they cant keep making foods that are not ordered by a lot of folks. They will have to throw out to much.

I do like supporting little guys, and I think there is definitely a lot of greed in business. But I also think sometimes the issues can be complicated. Like if you are a big business and you want to produce in your home country but it’ll raise the cost of your product by 50%, you may go out of business If you choose to produce locally. Hence you may not be able to solve the ethics of outsourcing by yourself.

I’m pretty sure shady stuff is going on with pharma controlling medicine in the US and west by I’m not knowledgeable enough to prove it. The only highly publicized metric that explicitly shows America pharma rips off Americans is that they sell their meds to other first world countries at much lower prices.

I did read a fascinating account that the current medical system was begun by Rockefeller and Carnegie, obviously both savvy businessmen, and they essentially had Congress make all their competing medical schools illegal, which is why alternative medicine is still the hated stepchild of the medical system today. The account went on to say the only reason any alternative medicine is allowed in the US today is because while abroad Nixon encountered acupuncture and thought it was cool and tried to make it and therapies like is available in the US.

Also, according to the doctor’s account, the diagnostic codes were created as part of pharma’s system to not to figure out your illness but to tie your illness to a specific medicine to sell you. This is also why we all struggle today when a big pharma company doesn’t have something they’re trying to sell us, because the system was set up not to recognize illnesses without a medicine to sell someone.

I think I checked briefly on Wikipedia to check if what this dr wrote about the inception and history of the current medical system was true and it seemed to check out with both Wikipedia and the experiences I’ve had as well as those I’ve heard. But I have not researched it in detail myself. I’m not saying that Rockefeller and Carnegie were horrible people, the system they set up might have worked great back then. But I think most would agree currently, whatever it has evolved into, has many problems.

Ha....I work in diagnostic medical coding. I guess I'm a bad guy huh?

Yes. I do believe more people in this "system" are slowely waking up though. Well that's my hope anyway.

Lol never mind.