> Start off being run by an owner who cares and is invested in making good food, grow to a local chain, start franchising, grow and get bought by corporate, focus changes from good food to profit and consistency, food quality craters, customers depart.

> It's the same with Applebee's, Chili's etc. at one point all these places were decent to good before corporate greed and mismanagement steps in and starts selling over-priced sugar cocktails and appetizer specials. It's no longer about providing good food and atmosphere to families but about extracting maximum value from a customer engagement.

There needs to be a single catch-all phrase for this type of process, which (I think) we've seen more and more regularly in recent years. We see it in physical businesses, and it's also probably behind the huge shift to subscription-based services online. My interpretation is that it's essentially the capitalism that we've had for decades, but taken to ever-greater extremes. It seems to be rooted in America (and indeed, arguably behind a decent proportion of America's increasing woes) but is gradually infecting Europe too.

Whenever I see examples, I think of /r/latestagecapitalism, or "hyper-capitalism" but I'm not sure these terms would be widely-enough understood to be helpful in discussing or explaining the phenomenon.