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The story
A thread on the German Lemmy community “c/dach” is making waves: Bäcker Eifler, a family-run bakery chain from Frankfurt, has been bought out by a private equity firm. Following doctors’ offices and clinics, now even the skilled trades (Handwerk) are becoming targets for investment funds — sparking a wave of concern over price hikes and declining quality. The opinion that “things would change if customers just chose where to shop” drew pushback from those who say prices are already too high to have that luxury of choice, splitting the thread between those weighing the logic of capital against the realities of everyday life.
After doctors’ offices and clinics, investment funds have found a new industry to target: the skilled trades. Frankfurt’s family-run bakery chain “Bäcker Eifler” has just been acquired by a private equity firm. (Reporter: Bianca von der Au)
Source: piefed.social / Original article here
What people said
Yep, not "~~enshittification~~" but "crapification" (a German pun, Verkackung) — pretty much guaranteed at this point.
It'll probably switch over to pre-made bake mixes.
But that only works if consumers actually have a choice. Around Frankfurt there's competition, so it's fine, but small towns don't have that luxury.
I just bake my own bread and trade it with friends, neighbors, and family. Fine by me if big capital chokes on its own greed and goes under. I've started doing this lately since I'm not a fan of the "sawdust bread" my local bakery sells these days.
You say "you get to decide for yourself where to spend your 1.30 euros," but
if you don't have enough money to begin with, you don't have the freedom to choose. That's a line only someone in a comfortable position would say.
You say "we as customers need to take that to heart again," but
that's still just talk for people with money to spare. Plenty of people can't always afford to drop a lot of cash on a single loaf of grain bread. Prices have gotten so high that lots of people are forced over to Aldi's mass-produced stuff. And honestly, a lot of today's bakery chains have already lost their integrity too, selling low-quality products of their own.
Isn't this really about regional monopolies? When chains merge, in some regions they already control 90% of the market outside of supermarkets and discount stores. And the antitrust authorities — toothless paper tigers that they are — probably won't say a word about buying up the remaining 10% either, reasoning that "it looks like there's competition" since the supermarket buying cartels are split among just four companies…
That's what they call the "enshittification phenomenon."
That's exactly the logic big capital has been feeding us for years now, even though the industry itself does nothing for a better world.
If your paycheck doesn't stretch far enough, you end up having to choose between buying one round of bread from the bakery or giving up bread for the next 3-4 days.
No. If you only have 1.30 euros for your entire breakfast, you can't spend it all on just one grain loaf.
Nah, Hofer/Aldi bread is fine by me. It's tasty too, and half the price.
I love Aldi's brioche bread.
On top of that, there's also the problem that you usually can't tell who owns which bakery these days. Even if you want to support the local economy, you can't choose where to shop because you can't see which ones actually are local.
In the end, whether you spend that 1.30 euros at Bakery 1, which just bakes off frozen dough from some giant factory, or Bakery 2, baking the same or slightly different frozen dough, it doesn't really make much difference either way.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
In Germany in recent years, there have been repeated reports of private equity (PE) firms buying up doctors’ offices and clinics, and this latest story is being seen as an example of that wave spreading to the skilled trades — specifically, to locally rooted bakery chains. The thread split between the argument that “consumers can push back against the logic of capital by choosing where they shop” and the counterargument that “this doesn’t hold for people who can’t even afford the luxury of choosing in the first place, since prices are already too high” — both positions were left standing as legitimate viewpoints. The term “Verkackung” (crapification) is a German riff on “enshittification,” the concept coined by American author Cory Doctorow to describe platform decay, and it’s used here ironically to predict quality decline after the buyout. It was also pointed out that it’s often hard to tell from the outside which investment group owns which bakery after a buyout, raising a structural problem: even if people want to shop with the local economy in mind, it’s genuinely difficult to do so in practice.
*This article is excerpted from a thread on the overseas forum Lemmy c/dach, “Warum jetzt auch Bäckerei-Ketten von Finanzinvestoren übernommen werden,” and loosely translated into Japanese by our editorial team. Our site takes responsibility for the translation.
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