Pluralistic: How corporate America built a better Roach Motel (07 Sep 2026)

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-10)

• Corporate America has shifted from competing for customers to “taking hostages,” using lock-in tactics to prevent customers from leaving rather than earning their loyalty, directly contradicting the “Chicago Boys” neoliberal economic theory that monopolies are efficient and self-correcting.
• A Stigler Center paper, “Rising Customer Durability, Falling Business Dynamism,” empirically demonstrates this shift, showing how companies like Sirius XM and eHealth boast about “contractual restrictions, bundling and ecosystem lock-in, and switching costs” in merger disclosures and earnings calls to maintain dominance.
• This customer lock-in leads to higher gross profit margins for dominant firms, fewer new market entrants, declining job creation, suppressed wages, and reduced innovation (fewer patents, less R&D), illustrating the process of “enshittification.”
• The “Age of Extraction” means companies prioritize taking a larger share of the existing economic pie over creating new value, resulting in worsening products, “shrinkflation,” and “junk fees” for locked-in customers and workers.