A lot of folks naively think that if a manufacturer cuts corners and reduces the quality of a good, then people will stop buying it, and the manufacturer won't want that. That notion is rubbish.
First, it's rubbish because it's very rare for incremental degradation of quality to materially affect demand. People like M&Ms. People would still like M&Ms if they tasted like they were made of sawdust and turpentine. Never underestimate the power of nostalgia. (Case in point: Cracker Jacks DO taste like sawdust and turpentine.)
i assume a lot of product perpetuity is connected to different starting points. That is, my starting point for how a particular chocolate bar should taste is rooted in a bar manufactured a long time ago under different standards.
However, a kid biting into a bar for the first time today has a very different reference point for what it is supposed to taste like. By the time that child is an adult biting into the bar and exclaiming "What happened to that tasty bar I remember?", a child is biting the same bar for the first time and thinking it's pretty good.
