I connect this in my head to a shift in presentation of things like big box stores, which look a lot more consistent and marketing-designed these days than they

I connect this in my head to a shift in presentation of things like big box stores, which look a lot more consistent and marketing-designed these days than they did in, say, the '90s. Hell, fast food chains, too. It's like some time in the '00s marketing departments across the board received a much greater mandate and I've got this funny feeling that only some of that, and maybe not most of it, is really justified by added value in dollar terms. But then, for as much as we pretend to be data-driven in business and pay lip service to various science-adjacent notions and think we've really got it all figured out, mooooost of it falls apart if you poke at it a little and it all starts to look very fad and social-proof driven. So I guess just add this to the list of weird stuff companies do for maybe-bad reasons.