Time and time again we see the mega corporations and the mega rich in America make life for the common person worse, while their fortunes continue to rise.
McDonalds, Amazon, WalMart, etc. These companies make billions in revenue, and plenty of profit, yet they keep paying their employees worse and worse compensation packages - packages that are completely illegal in every other developed country.
Why do Americans let this happen?
How bad does it have to get before something changes?
There is no gun to your head telling you to buy anything from McDonalds, Amazon or Walmart.
But you won’t find that small profitable businesses automatically have better compensation packages either, nor even those rising star hipster burger, coffee and grilled cheese joints that are smaller than the big players but still you know, corporate chains. If you want some modicum of independence from modern American consumerism, to take a fully principled stand against the way we do business in this country, take out a loan with your morally scrupulous bank and/or credit union and start a farm with the goal of feeding yourself and your family first and foremost. Or start a small business, but then see what you can afford to pay your workers when it turns out that what you would need to charge to pay them a living wage will drive people away from your business. $15 sandwiches or whatever might be delicious, but short of some very expensive areas with very expensive leases, they won’t sell in the quantities you need them to because it turns out, Americans do take a stand when it is their dollar or even just their time on the line. Which is why many of them shop at either Walmart or Amazon or even both.
They made themselves appealing by being cheaper and/or getting stuff to your door quicker than the competition. The market selected for these types of companies, and as a result they are incredibly profitable enterprises!
What's interesting is the more corrupt our economy grows, the less money itself becomes a reasonable abstraction people accept and believe in. When common acceptance in critical systems that require common acceptance fails, we have a complete mess on our hands.
The good (or bad depending on how you look at it) news is that people will need to be starving and miserable before that happens. We're entering a full paced modern form of servitude gung-ho. Maybe when it starts to approach slavery people will resist. Why people don't resist now will always puzzle me
> Time and time again we see the mega corporations and the mega rich in America make life for the common person worse, while their fortunes continue to rise.
Their fortunes don't actually continue to rise. They keep making the same ~5% profit on average. That's what keeps them in business.
Stock prices may have risen in the past, but that's due to macroeconomic factors such as low interest rates. They can fall just as easily and rapidly if the wind changes.
> How bad does it have to get before something changes?
It's actually not bad at all - Amazon, Wal-Mart and McDonalds are some of the few major companies employing significant amounts of people at the bottom end of employability, at better rates than what smaller businesses can offer.
McDonalds, Amazon, WalMart, etc. These companies make billions in revenue, and plenty of profit, yet they keep paying their employees worse and worse compensation packages - packages that are completely illegal in every other developed country.
Why do Americans let this happen?
How bad does it have to get before something changes?