The real reason cutting US customers off from OY Global is so offensive to all of us…
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and here’s where I landed: through places like OY, we in the US have been able to access affordable, extremely high quality, and safe skincare and makeup—making beauty and self-care something attainable for average Americans—you know, people who work for a living and/or aren’t wealthy.
Outside of KBeauty, beauty and skincare in the US has historically been classist like fashion: there’s Walmart to Drugstore to Macy’s to Boutique to Rx/bespoke, and you’re relegated to what you can afford. But with places like OY we middle and working class Americans have been able to buy extremely high quality products on the cutting edge of innovation when our own government doesn’t care about us enough to approve a new sunscreen filter for 20 years or regulate pesticides.
Every single part of Americans’ life and well-being has been commoditized and sold, and we’re to the point that these companies literally try to get away with selling us the poorest quality goods at the highest prices and act indignant when we push back on that or call that out.
And then here comes OY—a place we’ve trusted for YEARS to make self-care accessible—hyping up their new US stores and this message of accessibility with their full chest, only to exploit us like every other company feels entitled to do in this country. They took away almost all of the high-quality products and brands, tripled and quadrupled their prices, and wiped all of our loyalty points clean while they cut us off from the global marketplace.
And the WORST part is that they seemed to think they could do all this and we’d still be their happy customers. This is how bought-and-sold we are here, that OY is literally surprised that the US opening has received the backlash it has. We deserve to have access to these products too; instead, once again, the price on quality goods is artificially pumped up to a place we can’t reach and an knock-off that is 1/8th of the quality is sold to us at 1/2 of the pumped-up price.
TL;DR: it’s because they’ve treated us, as consumers, the way our own country treats us, and they’re surprised that we’re upset about it.