In the grand scheme of things, the customer may have slightly more pull than the cashier ringing up their order, but it’s the CEO and the board of directors that control the narrative. That’s why we’re getting bigger and less fuel efficient vehicles, bigger and more fattening meal portions in restaurants, and bigger less affordable houses.
I’m not disagreeing with you, but looking at it from another perspective: the customer is always right in the sense that for a business to survive, it needs to have customers to buy their stuff and generate revenue. Yes, they will also keep cutting costs to increase profit, but not at the cost of knowingly dropping revenues.
The bigger less efficient vehicles and bigger less affordable houses just mean that we are not their target customers.
For houses, Blackstone and the other big companies buying them at any price are what the customers builders and landowners want. What their end goal is? I don’t have a clue.
As for cars, bigger less efficient ones are usually bought by less conscious customers, who don’t care as much about practicality and cost of ownership. For car companies, it is cheaper and easier to build a worse car, let it market itself, and sell it at a high margin than it is to develop something better and educate careful customers into why they are better. As such, many just simply choose to target the former. That group is their customer, and they are always right. If that segment shrinks or changes, the company’s policy will too.
Blackstone’s end goal is to make everyone a renter.