Consumers in the United States are bearing the brunt of sweeping developments in the business landscape, with decades of mergers limiting options and companies pushing industry-friendly regulation to charge what they want, safe in the knowledge that disgruntled customers have nowhere to go. Experts say consolidation and market power have left consumers paying more for less, as customer satisfaction hits record lows while corporate profits soar.
Record Profits, Terrible Service
Corporate profits after tax jumped sharply during the Covid-19 pandemic and hit a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $3.7tn by the end of 2024, about double what they were in 2012. Despite a hit from tariffs at the end of 2025 and the impact of the US and Israel war with Iran, profits jumped again to $3.9tn in the first quarter of 2026. As a percentage of GDP, corporate profits hit a post-Second World War high of 15.8% in the fourth quarter of 2025, while employee compensation as a share of GDP dropped to less than 10%.
KPMG chief economist Diane C Swonk notes that the gap between company profits and employee compensation as a share of GDP has never been greater, calling it essentially "a measure of inequality, which creates social and economic instability." She dryly references the French revolution as "an extreme example" of that instability.
At the same time, customer complaints about goods and services are at record levels, surging 16% in the first quarter of 2026, according to the University of Michigan's American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which has tracked the figure since 1994. US consumer sentiment, tracked for over 60 years, has hit a new low due to cost-of-living increases that many say are eroding their personal finances.
Trapped Consumers with No Options
Despite their unhappiness, customers often stay with companies because they believe another company will treat them as badly or they simply have no alternative. "Paradoxically, and contrary to what occurs in efficient markets, customer retention has increased," wrote the satisfaction index's founder, Claes Fornell, in May 2026. In many cases, Americans have no other options, unlike in other developed consumer economies where stricter anti-monopoly policing has protected competition.
Marcus Herbert, editor of the influential British consumer advocate website Money Saving Expert, explains that in the UK, "I have multiple choices of broadband supplier and energy supplier. Consumers have true power in a world where they can switch their business to another provider."
With customers stuck and competitors gone, companies can raise prices without improving customer satisfaction, Fornell explained in February 2026. "These are not signs of a healthy economy," he added.
Consolidation's Benefits Dry Up
Being a US consumer through the later decades of the 1900s was marked by how much more goods and services many people could afford than previous generations. Consolidation brought relatively lower prices and greater choice, even as big box stores like Walmart hollowed out downtowns and left behind low-wage jobs. Goods prices compared to income plummeted as manufacturing moved overseas and big national retailers grew, squeezing out economies of scale and taking control of distribution networks.
"As frustrated as people are in the US, there is a decline between 1990 and 2012 of 33% cost of retail goods as related to your income," said Sergio Ocampo, an economics professor at the University of Western Ontario who researches retail concentration. "That is almost impossible to achieve without the efficiency gains from consolidation."
However, the sharp declines in retail prices stalled by the end of the 2010s, and the infrastructure that these giant companies control is a hurdle to new players. "There is nothing new coming … now if you want to start a new retail business you run into problems," Ocampo noted. Food, airlines, and telecoms have similar trajectories.
Four giant food-producing companies control at least 50% of the market for the most popular groceries Americans buy, a 2021 Guardian investigation found. The relative cost of airfare plummeted in the 1970s, making air travel affordable for the masses, but it is now creeping up and service complaints hit new records in 2024. Over 20 airlines in the 1970s have merged into seven, with just four airlines controlling nearly 70% of total market share, and one airline dominates market share in several major domestic airports.
A series of multi-billion dollar telecom mergers in recent years has been followed by broadcast consolidation that's creating a dangerous concentration of one-stop information, mobile, internet, and entertainment giants.
Consumer Anger and Activism
Consumers are becoming "reactive" and starting to see brands as "a rival or an adversary," said Alexander DePaoli, a Northeastern University marketing professor who studies consumer anger. They are trying to beat companies at their own game, sometimes taking extreme measures. For example, when Delta Airlines charged Marie Duggan, an economic historian visiting Oaxaca, Mexico, $1,200 to change a scheduled flight to the United States, she cancelled and booked a cross-border nighttime bus ride instead. She took a $250 flight on Aeromexico to Hermosillo, in the north-western state of Sonora, and then a $59 bus across the Mexico border. "I thought, 'Ha! You think I have no choice, but I know that there is a bus,'" she said. "So I will slip out of your grasp." A Delta spokesman said that, like the rest of the industry, it relies on "dynamic ticket prices" with "clear rules that determine pricing based on objective details."
Cory Doctorow, author of Enshitification: Why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it, compares the situation to an airport: "Asking why [companies] went 'bad' is like asking why a company that sells reasonably priced goods on the near side of the TSA checkpoint is charging $15 for water on the far side of the TSA checkpoint. It's not because they're evil, it's because you can't go anywhere else to buy your water."
A Tipping Point?
All that consumer rage can be channeled, says Doctorow, who recommends getting involved in very local politics to address specific problems. For example, community-owned broadband networks to address telecom deserts have been backed by voters and residents across the political spectrum. "The only Americans who like their internet are Americans with municipal fiber, and most of them are rural red state towns," he said.
Bipartisan lawmakers have introduced 40 bills in 24 states to curb 'surveillance pricing' in which companies use personal data to set individual prices, so far in 2026. New class action lawsuits are taking on JetBlue and other companies over the issue. Consumers' rising outrage is part of a growing awareness that many of these business practices are a destructive force on the economy, said Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a Washington thinktank aimed at increasing public power. "The incredible exponential growth in efforts to contain dynamic pricing suggests we may be reaching a tipping point," she said.
Local authorities are stepping up. States and cities are "really taking up the mantle on this and doing great work" on passing rules on junk fees and surveillance pricing, said Susan Weinstock, the CEO of the Consumer Federation of America, an umbrella group of consumer activists. "Once California and New York pass the laws, industry has to listen because that's a lot of customers," she said.
