Service to community. This is one of the problems rural America is struggling with. If the now nationally consolidated grocery store in a town of 2,000 people has lower profit margin than investors are demanding, you need to close it, and that town doesn't get a grocery store any more. That was the Walmart impact on rural America - they moved into a town, wiped out their local businesses because their efficiencies meant they could earn profit there, then decided the profit margins were too low and bounced out of town leaving the town with nothing.
When I was a kid there was a lot more of a focus on serving a community on the expectation that it would build loyalty to the business among the community - these were acts of 'create another customer'. When I was in college the local branch of the regional bank (covered the whole state) sat in the financial aid line and wrote out loans at the current federal college loan rate on the spot and paid whatever tuition you fell short on. It's been 40 years and I'm still appreciative of the semester the check from my dad didn't arrive in time and they covered me. That's how you create another customer. By comparison today cell companies, airlines, and so on barely even have a customer service department because so long as everyone hates their carrier equally, it's a cost center worth eliminating. It's worth losing the customer because we'll get them back with a BOGO contract offer in 3 years when they're pissed off at whoever they switched to.
Businesses used to have a more symbiotic relationship to the communities they were in than they do now. Sometimes that's at the customer level, sponsoring the local little league team, etc. My local developer pumps millions of dollars annually into the local school district, and you could look at that as nice bit of local charity, but it's also because the reputation of the local school district is what keeps housing prices high. That's not charity - it's an investment with a VERY good return. They don't put money into libraries or any other service that we need - just the one that drives housing demand. And sometimes it's at the worker level - the factory that ¼ of the town worked at is as dependent on the town as the town is on the factory. But we'll just move that to Mexico for the cheap labor because that's what investors demand and destroy the economy of this town.
There is concern right now that Intels struggles will mean the last US tech company making cutting-edge semiconductors may have to abandon that business. And that's a business that Apple and Nvidia could easily afford to catch and make use of, as well as AMD and Qualcomm or Microsoft or Google for that matter to abstract it one more layer. The US is invested in such a thing happening because we need a domestic manufacturer for national security reasons. I suspect the laser focus on shareholder return that has been banged into every part of the economy over the last 4 decades makes it very hard for any of these companies to be willing to work with their own federal government to try and catch that falling knife.
And it plays out in other ways - why has Boeing safety so gone to shit? Engineering is a ratchet that should only turn one way - once we figure out how to do something better, it should never get worse, and yet it is. Because there's more money to be saved in QA than there is to be lost in crashing planes. Whether or not that's true, Boeing management believed that to be true.
Competition does not always bring down prices and improve quality - this is only assured in commodity markets - it's much more complicated in non-commodity ones. The quality of PCs didn't improve with increased competition in the 00s because it turned into a race to the bottom. The safety of automobiles is getting worse, not better, and prices are increasing relative to inflation, not decreasing - because the entire industry is trying to lift profit margins. We're now at a point of trying to completely block cheap foreign cars in order to preserve those profit margins. We bailed out the banks risk taking and the automakers poor decision making because the societal costs of not doing that were too high, which created a moral hazard that remains to this day. The responsibility to the public that these industries at least had more of (I'm not pretending they were awesome) is completely nonexistent and all of those costs are now borne by taxpayers - and not taxes from the shareholders of these companies because cap gains rates are so low, but by workers. It's a virtuous cycle for the shareholders.
)
