I never set out to write a book about the decline of American business. I was perfectly happy ghostwriting memoirs and helping executives tell their success stories.
But I kept noticing the same fingerprints. Companies I had shopped at my whole life turning into hollow versions of themselves. The same private equity playbook working through one industry after another. The same optimization techniques that could have improved customer service, repurposed to maximise fee extraction. The same executives who had built good businesses describing the pressure they were under to dismantle what made them good.
The turning point came during a client conversation in 2023. A Fortune 50 executive was explaining how his company had optimized customer interactions, which in practice meant replacing human service representatives with chatbots designed to frustrate callers into giving up before they got help. He said it with the detached professionalism of a man walking through a routine process improvement.
That was when the pattern resolved. What I had been watching was not a run of unrelated business failures. It was the systematic conversion of American commerce from something built to serve customers into something built to extract from them.
What was the author doing before this book?
Twenty years running technology for a major national retailer, then a decade listening to executives tell their own stories.
Those two jobs turned out to be the qualification. The first taught me how large systems behave, and the second put me in a room with the people running them while they talked candidly about what they had been asked to do.
The same private equity playbook kept appearing in one industry after another. The same optimization techniques that could have improved service, repurposed to maximize fee extraction. The same executives who had built good businesses describing the pressure to dismantle what made them good.
I was not looking for a book. The pattern was too consistent to keep ignoring.
The book on this: The Enshittification of America traces thirteen American industries through the same private equity playbook, from what each one used to be to what it became.
What is the argument of The Enshittification of America?
That these outcomes are not failures.
We call them failures because the results are bad for customers, workers, and communities. But when a system is optimized for extraction instead of service, extraction is what it produces. When it rewards quarterly performance over long-term value, it gets quarterly performance.
The book is not about individual bad actors or isolated corporate greed. It is about a structure that consistently produces the outcome it was built to produce.
The book has a point of view and readers should know it before they start. It says so in the introduction instead of pretending to neutrality it does not have.
Which industries does the book examine?
Thirteen, each one traced from what it used to be to what it became.
Airlines. Restaurants. Department stores. Automotive. Newspapers and media. Banking. Healthcare. Telecommunications. Retail pharmacies. Hotels. Grocery stores. Theme parks. Movies.
Thirteen is enough that no single case has to carry the argument. One industry declining is a story about that industry. Thirteen declining the same way, in the same sequence, under the same ownership structures, is a story about the mechanism.
Does the book make the case for private equity?
Yes, in its own chapter, and I put it in deliberately.
A book with a strong position that never states the opposing case is a book asking readers to take its word for things. The strongest argument for private equity gets its own space, made as well as I could make it, before the rest of the book proceeds.
The same applies to the counter-examples. There are businesses that escaped this and they are not miraculous outliers or lucky accidents. They made different choices about ownership, about what to optimize, and about what counts as success. They are in the book because the evidence supports them.
Nobody paid to appear in it, favorably or otherwise.
What did Route 66 look like before?
I remember it, and that memory is why the book opens with a drive.
I rode Route 66 with my father on business trips in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the road still pulsed with something. What I was looking at was a working demonstration that businesses could thrive while serving the people around them, that owners could prosper while taking pride in the work, and that commerce could produce gathering places instead of transaction points.
The gas stations alone told the story. Pull into a Sinclair or a Phillips 66 and three attendants came out to the car.
Nostalgia is a cheap argument and I am aware of it. The reason the chapter exists is not that things were nicer. It is that those businesses were profitable while doing all of that, which means the current arrangement is a choice, not an inevitability.
How does the extraction work?
Boston Market is the clearest short example in the book.
The company had built its brand on the theatre of rotisserie cooking. Whole chickens turning visibly in front of customers, sides prepared fresh through the day, carving stations where somebody skilled sliced meat to order.
What followed was a sequence, not a decline. Load the company with debt. Extract immediate cash through dividend recapitalisation. Cut operating costs by removing skilled kitchen staff and replacing made-to-order preparation with reheating protocols.
The rotisserie chickens became dried-out shadows turning under lights that provided visual theatre and nothing else. The turkey went. The roast beef went. The pot pie stopped having any heft to it.
Nobody in that chain of decisions did anything irrational. Every step improved a number somebody was measured on.
Why does the book name individuals?
Because the money went somewhere and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Cataloguing billionaire spending sounds like resentment, and resentment is not the point. Anybody is entitled to spend their own money however they like.
The problem is how the money was made. Buying healthy companies, loading them with debt, charging those companies for the privilege of being acquired, and walking away while they collapse.
The parties matter because every dollar of them was paid for, line by line, by something that got destroyed. That is why the chapter exists and it is the only reason it exists.
What protects a business from this?
The counter-examples are real and they are not accidents.
Walk through downtown Portland on a wet Tuesday. The Starbucks on every corner is serving coffee out of an automated machine. Powell’s is still sprawling across an entire city block, gloriously chaotic, stuffed floor to ceiling, with staff who can find the obscure poetry collection you are looking for and who treat literature as a calling instead of inventory to move.
Powell’s is not a miracle. It made different choices about ownership, about what to optimise, and about what counts as success, and those choices are available to other businesses.
A third of the book is about that. What protects a company structurally, what policy would change the incentives, what consumers and communities can do, and how reforms of this kind have historically been won instead of requested.
Where does the evidence in the book come from?
Public records, mostly, and it says where.
Financial figures, employment statistics, fee disclosures, and corporate chronologies come from SEC filings, bankruptcy court documents, congressional testimony, regulatory agency reports, and named journalism from the publications that broke the stories.
A reader who wants to trace a specific claim has starting points named in the book. The bankruptcy filings for Toys R Us, Sears, and Steward Health Care. The Wells Fargo Senate hearing transcripts from 2016. The American Medical Association’s annual prior authorization surveys.
Client stories are in there too, with details changed to protect confidentiality. The patterns are real and the documented material is documented.
Does The Enshittification of America offer any solutions?
A third of the book is about that, and it is the part I most wanted to write.
What protects a business against this in the first place. What policy changes would alter the incentives. What consumers and communities can do, and how reforms of this kind have historically been won instead of requested.
The most frustrating thing about all of it is how preventable it was. We built these systems, which means they can be rebuilt.
I am tired of pretending widespread business degradation is simply how markets work. It is how these particular markets work, structured by these particular incentives, for these particular outcomes.
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