Etsy corporate gives canned reply to its Vintage Seller Community regarding missing drop down menu for Vintage shoppers

After 5 days, Etsy corporate sent one of its drone staff members into the Forums Bugs section to publish a canned reply to a thread discussed in my previous post  The reply appears on page 7 of the thread Drop down Menu for "Vintage" not working.

Read the reply from Lori W. there.  The canned bit is this:

"The Vintage drop down menu was removed from the navigation in September of 2017. In our research we found that most buyers are not first searching or browsing for items by when they were made or who made them. Buyers tend think about the item they want to buy, like a jacket or blanket, before deciding if they want it to be vintage or not. "

Maybe you don't remember the bit about shoppers "not first searching or browsing for items by when they were made or who made them", but I do.  It was first offered up to the Etsy seller community in 2012 as explanation for the 1) removal of the category list at the left side of Etsy's Homepage, replaced by 2) links to the "pin board" style Browse pages curated by Etsy that mixed a few (very few!) vintage items in with items listed as "handmade".

The takeaway from that bit of boilerplate is now, as it was in 2012, the revelation that Etsy corporate is tailoring the site to appeal to shoppers who don't care about either Handmade ("who made them") or Vintage ("when they were made").  Etsy's targeted shopper for the site as a whole is simply looking for jackets or blankets, the two items cited by Lori W.

Dunno about you, readers, but I find it surprising that Etsy offers up the same data on shopping behavior they used 6 years ago to pacify sellers.

But there it is, straight from the corporate keyboard:  Etsy is not interested in structuring the site so that shoppers searching specifically for Handmade or Vintage can find what they're looking for.