Masthead

Why We Can't Have Nice Things is a running inventory of things that used to be good, before enough people found out exactly how good. Every entry here is a real policy, program, or promise that worked exactly as advertised — right up until "unlimited" turned out to have a limit, and someone found it.

How a nice thing dies

The pattern rarely changes. A company launches something generous — free returns, an honesty box, a pass with no fine print — because trusting people is cheaper than policing them, at first. Then a small number of customers treat the trust as a dare. The company issues a statement about "a small minority of users." Everyone else gets a policy update.

Editorial standards

We don't invent anything. Every post is built from public reporting — company statements, court records, news coverage — and cited at the bottom, because credibility matters even in obituaries for return policies. We are, however, extremely comfortable naming the specific customer, city, or spreadsheet responsible.

Who this is for

Anyone who has ever read a company's "policy update" email and wanted to know who, exactly, they should be mad at. It's usually about forty people. One of them had a spreadsheet.

A note on tone

We are not angry. We are taking notes. History doesn't remember the millions of people who used a nice thing responsibly — it remembers the one who microwaved it. We're just writing it down before the company's PR team gets there first.

Everything is fine, except everything.