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 after twenty years managing technology at Trader Joe’s and then a decade listening to business leaders share their real stories, I started noticing patterns that kept me awake at night.
The same private equity playbook destroying one industry after another. The same optimization algorithms that could improve customer service getting repurposed to extract from it. The same executives who built great businesses explaining how they were pressured to dismantle what made those businesses great.
What does the private equity playbook look like from inside?
Ordinary, and that makes it difficult to argue with while it’s happening.
Nobody in these rooms describes themselves as degrading a business. They describe a margin target, a cost line that’s grown, a service level that’s above what the market requires. Each decision is defensible on its own terms and most of them are individually correct. What accumulates is a company that’s worse at the thing it exists to do, arrived at by a series of decisions where nobody chose that outcome. I watched companies I’d shopped at my whole life turn into hollow shells of themselves. Airlines that once made flying feel special now treat passengers like cattle. Department stores that anchored communities became something else.
Is criticism of private equity only nostalgia?
It’s a fair challenge and the answer is that the changes are measurable.
Everybody thinks things were better when they were younger and most of the time everybody is wrong. So the test has to be specific instead of atmospheric. Seat pitch. Fee structures. Staffing per store. Product lifespan. Time to reach a human being.
Those are numbers instead of feelings, and where I could find them they moved in one direction. That doesn’t make every memory accurate. It does mean the general impression is tracking something real.
Why do executives go along with a private equity playbook?
Because the pressure is structural, and I say that having listened to a lot of them describe it. The people telling me these stories had built something they were proud of. They explained how they were pressured to take it apart, usually with some regret and usually with a clear account of what the alternative would have cost them personally. An executive who refuses is replaced by one who doesn’t. It excuses nobody, and it’s an accurate description of the mechanism. Blaming people is emotionally satisfying and analytically useless, because the same structure produces the same result with different people in the chairs.
Is private equity rollup just how markets work?
No, and that phrase is doing an enormous amount of concealing. I wrote this book because pretending that widespread business degradation is just how markets work is a cop-out. It’s not. It’s how these particular markets work, structured by these particular incentives. The proof is that the exceptions exist. There are companies that haven’t done this, and they’re not outliers or lucky accidents. They’re companies that made different choices about ownership, about optimization, and about what success means.
If the outcome were a law of markets, there would be no exceptions. There are. That means it’s a choice. That means somebody chose. Get stars in your eyes and go after public or private equity. That’ll burn a company down. The financial stress will kill you. I wrote a whole book on it, The Enshittification of America.
Why does the technology part of the private equity playbook matter?
Because I spent twenty years on that side of it and watched the same tools go both ways.
The optimization algorithms that could improve customer service are the same ones that get repurposed to extract from it. It’s the same technology. What differs is the objective it’s pointed at, and that objective is set by people who are usually several layers away from anybody who will experience the result. I couldn’t have written that part without the technical background, and it’s why the book isn’t simply an economics argument.
The book on this: The Enshittification of America is the pattern traced across industry after industry, from twenty years inside a large company and a decade listening to executives describe what they were pressured to dismantle.
What is the argument against the private equity playbook?
The degradation is a pattern. It repeats across industries with the same steps.
It’s produced by incentives instead of by villains. Which is worse, because incentives don’t change their minds.
The exceptions prove it’s a choice. Different ownership structures produce different behavior.
The same tools can do either. The technology is neutral and the objective function isn’t.
Saying it’s just how markets work is a way of ending the conversation. It’s a refusal to give an explanation.
I would have been content to keep writing memoirs. What changed is that I heard the same story often enough, from people who had been in the room, that not writing it down started to feel like a choice of its own.
