I guess times have been tough for a long damn while then…

When times are tough, accept less growth (or sometimes none) so that when times get good again or someone builds a competitor, all your customers don't leave you.

The real big brain move is to be your own competitor, so you extract value from customers either way. If they don't switch, you get to extract value via planned obsolescence and plain old extortion. If they do switch to avoid the extortion, you at least get to keep the price of their new NAS, and you weren't likely to get the extortion money anyway.

America has thousands of food brands but they're all owned by about 6 companies.

This is more about EBITDA.

Serving the needs of customers (practically the quality of the product) sits down in the list of importance. Sales strategy, marketing, PR, organizational culture, company values, ..., basically the self-serving measures come all before that.

This is depressing, but feels accurate. How do we collectively get out of this mess?

Don’t give them money.

Capitalism. It’s why we can’t have nice things.

Capitalism is the reason we have so many nice things. :)

this... it's the only reason technology has advanced so quickly

I think there's actually no point in being profitable, it always seems to lead to even more greed, power and corruption.

Better to have a heart, care more about your customers, don't put profits first, but still make enough to keep the lights on.

I think that would make everyone happier anyways.