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.
Capitalism broke down (well, it was torn down) during the pandemic and the shitty quality of market goods is a result of the lack of free market completion.
Things were improving steadily as they tend to do under free market operations, and then as part of our emergency response we forcibly shut down the economy.
That starved small business, and those small businesses got acquired, and as a result there is now more market consolidation, hence less competition, hence less incentive to improve.
Horizontal market concentration is definitely emergent from capitalism in a free market. This accelerated it, but things weren’t getting better beforehand.