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A year or so ago, I stopped going to a popular fast food franchise because they raised the price of my regular order from $6.50 to $9.50 for no apparent reason. I only ever went there when I was in a hurry and needed something cheap, so when they could no longer fulfill the second half of that bargain (and the first half was hit or miss to begin with), it wasn’t a hard choice to drop them.
I don’t want to reveal the name of this franchise, so I will instead simply describe it as a formerly clown-themed interstate-adjacent hamburger dispensary.
My girlfriend Lauren and I were on a trip recently and we stopped at one of these restaurants because it was conveniently interstate-adjacent and we needed to walk our dog Hank. I went inside to order two things: a fountain drink for myself and a cup of water for Hank.
I hadn’t been inside one of these places in a long time, so the first thing I noticed was that you couldn’t just go up to the counter and order anymore. Instead, they had these kiosks where you had to enter your order on a giant tablet.
I punched in my drink and went through the menu options to figure out how to order a cup of water. Under the “water” subheading, there were two options: a bottle of water for almost three dollars, or a free cup of water. The free cup of water was marked as “sold out.”
I ordered my drink and a bottle of water, which came to about six dollars. After navigating through multiple menus to confirm that I was not a member of the Hamburger Discount Club and I did not want to round up my order so that I could contribute to the parent company’s annual tax write-off, I was finally able to pay.
The credit card reader gave me an error message and told me to take my receipt to the front counter. It did not print out a receipt.
I went up to the front counter, managed to summon an employee, paid for my order, and left.
I’m going to confess a personal failing of mine. I mask it pretty well, but the truth is, I have no patience. None. Something broke inside my brain while I was working from home during the pandemic and now every time I’m in public I’m experiencing, at best, constant low-level agitation. So I’m not exaggerating when I say that spending several minutes navigating a fast food kiosk and then having it fail at its most basic functions fills me with white-hot, incandescent rage.
This is a feeling I experience pretty regularly now because — and perhaps you’ve noticed this as well — every technological advancement that capitalism has given us just lately is absolute garbage.
I don’t want to navigate automated phone menus. I don’t want to scan and bag my own groceries. I don’t want to scan a QR code to view a menu. I don’t want to have to download an app to pay for parking. I don’t want to have to download any more apps at all. I may be a Millennial, but I’ll die on this hill with the Boomers.
I just want companies to pay people a living wage so they can interact with me. Is this too much to ask? It was a pretty good system that lasted for centuries before tablets became cheap.
Why is everything so terrible? The answer is actually pretty straightforward:
It’s the shareholders’ fault.
If you’re on the board of directors for a company, you answer to the shareholders. And the shareholders want only one thing: every fiscal quarter, they want you to present them with numbers that are bigger and better than the numbers you brought them three months ago.
Did you experience record-breaking profits last quarter? Congratulations! Your reward is that you now have a new record to break! And you’d better do it or there will be consequences.
But what happens when you’ve hit equilibrium, the point where you’ve opened every restaurant that the market will bear and lured in every customer that will ever buy your product?
What seems to happen is that companies figure out how to automate different processes so that they can cut down on their employees. Then they start boosting prices to gouge their customers.
It’s not too bad at first. You notice that the stuff you used to buy went up in price a little bit, but maybe that’s just the aftershocks from those supply chain issues we had awhile back. You notice that there seem to be a whole lot more self-checkouts than there used to be, but maybe it’s just your imagination.
But the shareholders are never satisfied, and the death by a thousand cuts continues, and the next thing you know, the business you used to patronize is a sterile, empty husk designed to pry money out of your pocket and kick you back out the door as quickly as possible.
Eventually, I think all of these companies that are gouging their consumers in the name of profit are going to have to either reassess the way they do business or face total collapse. The franchise I mentioned at the top of the column has already been reporting lower revenues as their customer base is increasingly deciding to eat at home or spend their money elsewhere.
Corporations and their shareholders will eventually have to learn that nothing can grow forever. Everything in nature must eventually find equilibrium.
Actually, there is at least one good example in nature of something that doesn’t stop growing until it destroys the system in which it exists. It’s called cancer.
I agree with you, though it only hurts us to get angry, and not the corporation. We can write letters or boycott
I am a small shareholder, but the other reason for higher prices is the enormous salaries paid to CEOs, CFOs, etc. which are hundreds of times greater than those of their average employees. On a separate issue, at the place where I volunteer, we have seen some landlords double the rent for their low income clients since last year, especially where investment companies have bought a former individual landlord’s properties.