Corporate Profits Hit a 80-Year High. Your Airline Charged You $1,200 to Go Home.

The Numbers Tell the Story and the Story Is Ugly

Here is what is actually happening, stripped of spin. Corporate profits after tax hit a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $3.9 trillion in the first quarter of 2026, according to The Guardian. As a share of GDP, corporate profits reached 15.8% in the fourth quarter of 2025. That is a post-World War II record. The last time anything close to this happened, Eisenhower was president and a gallon of gas cost a quarter.

At the same time, employee compensation as a share of GDP has dropped to less than 10%. The gap between those two numbers has never been wider in modern American history. KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk put it plainly, telling The Guardian this gap is essentially 'a measure of inequality, which creates social and economic instability.' She then referenced the French Revolution as 'an extreme example' of that instability. When your chief economist is invoking guillotines, you may want to take a moment.

The Customer Is Not King. The Customer Is a Pigeon.

The University of Michigan has been tracking consumer sentiment for over 60 years. It just hit a new low. Customer complaints about goods and services surged 16% in the first quarter of 2026, according to the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which has tracked that figure since 1994. Both records. Both terrible.

Here is the part that should make your head explode. Despite being furious, people are staying with the companies they hate. The satisfaction index's founder, Claes Fornell, noted in May that 'paradoxically, and contrary to what occurs in efficient markets, customer retention has increased.' Translation: Americans are getting ripped off, they know they're getting ripped off, and they have nowhere else to go. This is not a customer relationship. This is a hostage situation with a loyalty rewards program.

Fornell said in February that companies can now raise prices without improving customer satisfaction because trapped customers and eliminated competitors have made the normal rules of markets irrelevant. 'These are not signs of a healthy economy,' he added. That is the kind of understatement that deserves its own award.

Decades of Mergers Built This Cage

This did not happen overnight and it did not happen by accident. The Guardian's reporting makes clear that decades of mergers have systematically eliminated consumer choice across sector after sector. Companies got so big they could push industry-friendly regulation and then charge whatever they wanted, knowing full well that disgruntled customers had nowhere to go.

Author Cory Doctorow, who literally wrote the book on this phenomenon, called it 'enshitification.' His explanation to The Guardian is worth quoting in full because it is the most honest framing you will find anywhere: '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.' They are not evil. They just know you cannot leave. Once you understand that dynamic, everything from your cable bill to your health insurance deductible to that Delta change fee starts making a horrible, perfect sense.

The Rest of the World Figured This Out Already

Look at what other developed countries did differently. Marcus Herbert, editor of the influential UK consumer advocacy site Money Saving Expert, told The Guardian: '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.' Stricter anti-monopoly enforcement in the UK and across much of Europe meant competition survived long enough to keep doing its job.

In the United States, the opposite happened. Mergers were waved through. Regulators were captured or defanged. And now Americans pay more for worse internet, worse airline service, worse healthcare outcomes, and worse customer experiences than most of their peer nations. Not because Americans are bad consumers, but because the legal framework that was supposed to protect competition was systematically dismantled while everyone was watching something else.

Alexander DePaoli, a Northeastern University marketing professor who studies consumer anger, told The Guardian that customers are now starting to see brands as 'a rival or an adversary.' That is a profound shift. It used to be that brand loyalty was about trust. Now it is about which company you distrust least. That is not a consumer economy. That is a protection racket with better graphic design.

So What Does Anyone Actually Do About This

Marie Duggan, the economic historian who took the midnight bus through Sonora rather than hand Delta $1,200, arrived exhausted on the other side of the border. She was pleased with herself, and honestly, fair enough. But The Guardian is right to note that dangerous bus rides and product boycotts are not a systemic solution. One person's principled stand against a trillion-dollar industry is a rounding error on a rounding error.

The St. Louis Fed's economist Ricardo Martin pointed out that the pandemic accelerated the shift toward a digital economy that let firms produce more with fewer resources, particularly in retail and wholesale. Fewer workers, more automation, higher profits, worse service. That is the direction things are heading without serious intervention. The question of what intervention looks like, who has the political will to do it, and whether any of the people currently running the federal government have any interest whatsoever in reining in corporate power is, at this particular moment in American history, a question that practically answers itself.