They came for your department stores, your newspapers, your hospitals. Now—hold onto your sesame seed bun—they’re coming for your burger. The drive for fatter profits means higher prices, lower quality, tougher conditions for workers, and sometimes the blowup of the business itself.
You might think that just because this kind of corporate consolidation and profitization is precisely what economic models of capitalism predict in absence of careful regulation, that maybe this is a good example of capitalism, but actually no it’s “a perversion of capitalism created by our legal system”
Private equity firms are leading the charge in enshittifying your burger experience. Brendan Ballou, former DOJ special counsel for private equity, has described these opaque entities as “a perversion of capitalism created by our legal system,” and they’ve sunk their teeth into a sprawling collection of familiar restaurant names, from big national chains to regional spots you may think of as local. At the food website Ravenous, you can find a list of restaurants affected, including some of the biggest names in the burger pantheon, like Burger King, Sonic, Wendy’s, and Whataburger.