Alright, here goes.

Investors buy stock. They (the owners) select officers and set goals for them—the goals are implemented via bonus packages for earnings / sales / operating costs, etc.

The officers then set policies for DMs who execute them via individual store managers.

If the owners are going to own the stock for a long time, they want to focus on sustainable growth. They'll set reasonable targets and focus on employee growth and providing good service to their customers.

As a result, the mandate they give their officers (via bonus structures) will emphasize sustainable growth, and the officers will select policies accordingly.

But what if the owners just want to maximize their return? Money now is more valuable than money later. They'll set aggressive sales and cost targets that can be reached short term but only by cutting corners.

Burn out of store managers from overworking themselves because they don't have enough hours to give their employees.

Dirty, messy stores because they're understaffed.

People working multiple part-time jobs with no benefits instead of a full-time job.

If you've been in retail, you've seen this stuff. "The DM says this is all the hours we get." Because more hours would raise operating costs and result in no bonus for the DM, because it would mean no bonus for THEIR boss.

This isn't sustainable. Skilled, capable workers burnout, especially at the store management level. Workers below them can't make ends meet on the hours they receive. The shopping experience is miserable as a result of this, too.

This isn't theoretical, by the way. The direct impact of the short term ownership mentality that drives short term growth at the expense of sustainability is very real.

I studied business in graduate school, and I have many friends in retail. When they tell me how overworked they are, you can literally just follow the trail up. It isn't rocket science.

It's a fundamental problem. As long as ownership is allowed to focus on short term results only, employees will suffer (and the customer experience will be crap, too).

So when you're in a store bitching about how dirty it is or how rude the workers are... also ask yourself how many hours the store manager has? How much can they compensate these people for their work?

How many hours does the DM have for their entire district? How much money do they stand to lose if they go over, even if it is take care of problems that need to be addressed?

How big is that bonus the officers are getting? What's the bonus structure incentivizing? A lot of the times, you'll find that the problems on the ground are the shit that has rolled downhill.

As a final note for people who want to come back with "yeah but socialism," drop the absolutism. You can have criticisms of specific mechanisms in a machine without wanting to replace the whole thing.

That said, our machine is pretty broken down and needs not just emergency short term repair but better long term care, too.

Our whole economic system thinks short term right now. It's a problem.