Add the fact that, if legal marijuana is priced low enough to make black market dealers less common, the people selling the marijuana will now be forced to only sell to people 21+.
I’m not saying that this is the case as legal recreational marijuana sale prices in many legal states are high enough (due to taxes or artificial supply dampening due to restricting who can grow it and how much) to justify the existence of a black market, but if that was the case, I’d expect a drop off in youth usage.
I’ve been saying for a while that I expect the next big “veganeque” movement to be some kind of modern luddites. Maybe not as detached from modern society as the Amish, but a more 90s-like tech scene.
No cell phone on them at all times (but maybe some equivalent to a car phone/pay phone), placing the restriction to consciously “log on” to the internet, no (at least ad-based) social media, and maybe keep their online persona to appearances on mostly decentralized forums.
Personally, I know it would benefit me to detach from the one social media platform I have left and am fully addicted to (YouTube), but it’s hard when that is the platform that videos are stored on (though if I really cared, I would only subscribe to channels via RSS and watch them or individually search for things I wish to see instead of infinitely scrolling.) It’s also hard to keep up with group activities or the best classifieds listings or local music/arts events without Facebook.
I don’t believe that there will ever be a true competitor for services that can operate at scale like Facebook and YouTube (especially the latter), but I expect these modern luddites to accept this and reject those platforms even if it is socially ostracizing (much like veganism). To fill the void, they’ll create platforms and devices for them specifically. I imagine the goal of the platforms will be to avoid unnecessary bloat and keep hosting/maintenance costs low, which seems relatively easy if sucking every last second of retention out the user is not financially incentivized like it is in ad-based platforms. I expect the hardware to prioritize cost-efficiency, repairability, and a minimal feature set that doesn’t require frequent upgrades.
Then I imagine for a time, the movement will become trendy and people will begin flooding those platforms. The challenge then becomes to avoid capitalizing on the influx and keep the initial morals in mind and not start showing ads/trying to increase retention time. I think those projects may need to be decentralized and/or established as nonprofits with stated non-retractable tenets from their creation (“We shall never serve advertisements”, “We shall prioritize the distribution of useful information above all else”, etc.)
It’s a utopian view of the future, but I think it is possible. I think we’ll hit a day when we realize that spending 10+ hours a day staring at glowing rectangles is not bringing us closer to real fulfillment. I expect that as long as capitalism is the dominant economic force, businesses will always embrace the newest technology to avoid a massive gap in their output when compared to competitors, and the tech companies will always be pushing new addictive technology as long as it isn’t globally regulated, but after work, the people will wake up to the fact that they at least have a choice on whether or not they spend the rest of their leisure time staring at glowing rectangles.
They took away the in-store phones while I was working there too. Taking phone calls definitely added work to the (in my opinion) already overworked employees, but from a customer standpoint, it’s absolutely ridiculous to not be able to call the store who has your computer.
The corporate mindset is “let’s cut costs and let the people working at customer service/Geek Squad/the sales floor take the blame from angry customers for our streamlining.”
I was a Geek Squad “agent” in college and Best Buy has continued to prove that they’ve lost sight of the sole value proposition Best Buy had: people want a physical place to walk into to get advice on what tech to purchase, and that same place should be able to service the tech.
Before 2020, there was a big focus on Geek Squad membership sales (Total Tech Support) as they saw the $200 yearly subscription as almost free money. They were paying the Geek Squad anyways, and there was no material cost to us providing service, so that increased both customer loyalty and revenue. It’s a great service model, until one of two things happens: 1) you’ve sold the service to almost everyone who can utilize it, or 2) a global pandemic breaks loose.
As it turns out, both of those happened around the same time. (This is not based on any internal numbers, just anecdotal experience when it became increasingly harder to sell TTS as most people either had it already or didn’t need it.)
In 2020, there was a corporate shift to focus on the Best Buy website, which really felt like the nail in the coffin to the store.
My old store is a ghost town now. Horribly understaffed. I took my mom there to buy a Macbook and we were all but standing with $1.5k clenched in our fists and nobody came out to take it: not because the employees are lazy, but because there were no employees.
Every passing year that Best Buy hasn’t been liquidated is a surprise and achievement.
My biggest problem with the current textbook industry (among many) is that each textbook manufacturer uses their own proprietary format for reading the books and doing assignments. Wiley and Sons uses WileyPlus which, in its original incarnation, used Flash until the very last day Flash was officially supported. Don't want a potential security hole installed onto your laptop? Too bad, transfer to a different school because this one has been bought out by Wiley and Sons. And the interface was absolutely horrid. If you were doing division in their math website and entered a "/", they never set up the Javascript to state you were typing in a textbox so Firefox would open the "search this page" prompt.
This system made doing my homework more frustrating, not less. I dreaded doing math homework every day from age 16-20, not because I didn't want to learn, but because I was constantly fighting WileyPlus' "quirks" instead of just doing the math.
All of these websites, not WileyPlus alone, also have horrible uptime. There were often times I had pressing homework to do and would be met with a "Servers are down for maintenence" screen. Since the textbook publishers cut predatory deals with the universities, professors are completely unable to switch to another publisher if these availability problems get out of hand. This leads to worse education outcomes, frustration with the professors who are constantly wrestling with the website, and students being forced to take out predatory loans to pay for these horrible books.
I’m not saying that this is the case as legal recreational marijuana sale prices in many legal states are high enough (due to taxes or artificial supply dampening due to restricting who can grow it and how much) to justify the existence of a black market, but if that was the case, I’d expect a drop off in youth usage.