Why is everything in consumer / American life so fucking shitty now - and companies literally just say 'oh bc profit margins' and we're now expected to swallow that and sympathize?
Why is everything in consumer / American life so fucking shitty now - and companies literally just say 'oh bc profit margins' and we're now expected to swallow that and sympathize?
like I went to taco bell and they didn't even have napkins out. they had the other stuff just no napkins, I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don't get napkins! so they can save $100 per quarter rather than provide the barest minimum quality of life features.
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Because stocks kept trading at higher and higher P/E ratios essentially saying "the market thinks this company can make much more money in the future than they are making now."
The problem is, most companies couldn't, and as we have hit a recessionary phase those companies are now scrambling to try to show continued growth justifying their price.
The way they do that is by cutting off their limbs and selling them for short term cash at long term consequence.
So you see them cutting costs in all kinds of ways that screw over their customers but can show quarterly profits. Even though it means customers may not stay customers if better options appear.
So we are in this sort of pendulum swing period where large corporations suck because there's effectively no competition that doesn't and sucking is the last way for them to squeeze water from a stone. The natural solution is that we'd see competition rise up that doesn't suck to take their customers away and force pro-customer changes.
This likely will eventually happen, but it's going to take time. There are emerging tech trends that will accelerate it, but are still a few years away from practically changing the equation.
In about a decade things should suck less, and a number of the crappy companies around right now may no longer be around, but in the meantime it's still going to suck for a while yet as things adjust to the dying of the old guard and birth of the new.
I don't really agree with this. It is the answer that I think classical economics would give but I just don't think it's useful. For one, it ignores politics. Large corporations also have bought our government, and a few large wealth management funds like vanguard own a de facto controlling share in many public companies, oftentimes including virtually an entire industry, such that competition between them isn't really incentived as much as financial shenanigans and other Jack Welch style shit.
Some scholars (i think I read this in Adrienne bullers value of a whale, which is basically basis for this entire comment) even argue that we've reached a point where it might be more useful to think of our economy as a planned economy, but planned by finance instead of a state central authority.
All that is to say: why would we expect competition to grow, as you suggest, when the current companies already won, and therefore have the power to crush competition? They've already dismantled so many of the antimonopoly and other regulations standing in their way. The classical economics argument treats these new better companies as just sorta rising out of the aether but in reality there's a whole political context that is probably worth considering.
Good point well made. I think it's usually naive wishful thinking (for a "just world" that makes sense and is going to be OK, actually) that allows a liberal capitalist apologist to point to classical economics and say "see the companies are hurting," but the companies don't have feelings, and the owners and shareholders are feeling just fine.
I woukd say it's even worse than that: Free Market only works if humans behaved in a certain way (the so called homo economicus) which has long be disproven by Behavioural Economics and in Markets with low barriers to entry (i.e. teddy bears or soap, not railways or internet service provision) and even then it can't deal will systemic problems (basically any Negative Externality such as Polution or Greenhouse Gas emissions, or over consumption of share resources - a.k.a. Tragedy of the Commons - such as with overfishing or in depletion of mineral resources).
People have been fed by politicians and think-tanks with shaddy funding an oversimplified theory that sounds amazing if you do not at all dig into the details, whilst not actually working in reality, not even close, but of course you're never be told that by the people who win the most from the system built on top of this theory.
(It's actually funny how this is the Capitalist mirror of Communism: beautiful high-level theory, never worked and can't work in practice - because people are as they are, the physical world is as it is and human systems work as they work - and the people whose priviledges come from the system created to implement said theories will never ever tell you they don't work and never will even after a half a century experiment: in fact they'll just tell you it's only not working as expected because it has not been done with enough "purity" and hence we need to double-down to make it work)
I disagree on your expectations for improvement, though agree on the rest.
There are lots of markets with natural barriers to entry were there isn't any realistic chance for a new competitor to arrise and even if one did thanks to, say, some new technology, they'll almost certainly only "disrupt" until they became well established and then do the same as all the rest because that maximizes profitability (just look at Uber a decade ago and look at Uber now).
Then there are lots of markets were crooked politcians (which nowadys seems to be most of the ones in the mainstream parties) make sure there are artificial barriers to entry so that well-connected companies are protected from competition - pretty much any market were an operating license is required, such as Banking and Mobile works like that - and that too means no costumer-friendly competitors will arrise in such markets, ever, because the gatekeeping which is in the hands of said crooked politians stops them before they even start, and said political gatekeepers couldn't care less about consumer-friendliness of market participants and they'll only change their ways if forced to politically and that's not going to happen in countries with voting systems designed to maintain a political duopoly such as the US were the politicians rarelly fear losing their positions, especially on complex hard to explain things like how consumers suffer from them "maintaing high artifical market barriers to entry"
In the old days, before neoliberalism got entrenched, you might have such natural or artificial monopoly or cartel markets occupied by a Public company, which due to the lack of competition quickly grew inneficient (in my professional experience the same happens in Private companies in such a situation, by the way), though cheap, and on which there was often political pressure to improve. Now you have them occupied by Private companies who are driven solely by profit-seeking, so it's still shit (because they cut costs) only it's also expensive for customers rather than cheap (because they try to squeeze costumers with high prices) and suffers zero political pressure because the politicians hide behind the "It's a Free Market" to refuse to regulate whilst secretly waiting for their Non-executive board memberships as rewards for being "friends of business" - a wonderful example of all this are Railways in the UK.
this sort of talk will get you killed in the revolution, fair warning.
🙄