The Consumed Consumer

See The System

I think I’ve observed something in the marketplace.

I can sign up for a service in minutes but spend much longer trying to leave it. I can buy a device and call it mine while its repair still depends on parts, software, or tools controlled by the company that sells it. I can use an app without handing over money and still give something valuable—my attention, habits, preferences, clicks, and time. I can even walk down a store aisle, surrounded by different brands, and find several owned by the same company.

None of this proves that the marketplace is working against me. Some subscriptions are useful. Data can improve a service. Repair restrictions can have legitimate purposes. Companies can own many brands and still compete fiercely.

We know that profit is not a discovery, and complexity is not corruption.

But there is a question worth asking: When did buying something become more than a singular exchange, and when did my money become only one aspect of the relationship?

The familiar picture of commerce is simple: a business offers something useful, a customer decides whether it is worth the price, and money changes hands. That exchange still exists, but it no longer tells the whole story.

A payment may recur. A service may learn from your behavior. A device may draw you into an ecosystem. Leaving may mean transferring data, replacing accessories, rebuilding preferences, learning another system, or simply enduring enough inconvenience that staying becomes easier.

None of that is automatically bad. Continuing relationships can create continuing value. The better question is: What does the relationship ask from you in return?

Is it money? Attention? Information? Dependence? Then, how easily can you leave? What happens when the terms change? And as your relationship becomes more valuable to the company, does it become more valuable to you?

We call ourselves consumers because we consume. But increasingly, the consumer relationship itself can have value: recurring revenue, data, attention, loyalty, future purchases—the list seems to go on. The price tag may no longer tell us everything being exchanged.

So look around.

What do you see?

The easiest way to miss a pattern is to encounter it one inconvenience at a time.

Take subscriptions. Recurring payments can reduce hassle and keep a useful service running without requiring the customer to repurchase it each month. The Federal Trade Commission recognizes those benefits.[1]

However, the same agency reported in 2026 that it had received more than 100,000 complaints during the preceding five years involving negative-option practices and related problems, including unwanted charges and difficulty cancelling.[1]

Both facts matter.

The subscription is not the problem. The relationship deserves scrutiny when entering is easy, staying is profitable, and leaving becomes harder than the customer reasonably expected.

Economists call some of that friction switching costs: the money, time, effort, or inconvenience involved in changing providers. Moving files, rebuilding playlists, replacing compatible accessories, or learning another system can all make leaving costly even when another option looks better.[2, 3]

Sometimes those costs are unavoidable. But once leaving becomes difficult, the customer is no longer comparing prices alone.

Data changes the exchange in another way. In 2024, the FTC reported that major social-media and video-streaming companies collected and monetized extensive personal information, particularly through advertising-driven business models. In those markets, consumers can produce economic value through their attention and behavior even when they never directly pay for the service.[4]

That does not make data use inherently abusive. Information can improve security, recommendations, personalization, and usability. Rather, we should ask: Do we, the people, understand the exchange and receive something worthy in return?

Ownership complicates what we see too. Procter & Gamble’s portfolio includes Tide, Gain, Downy, Dawn, Febreze, Crest, Oral-B, Gillette, Pantene, Head & Shoulders, Olay, Old Spice, Secret, Bounty, Charmin, Pampers, and many other familiar names.[5]

Those are not therefore fake choices, nor does their shared ownership prove a lack of competition. It simply means that the logos on the shelf are not always a map of the ownership behind them.

Repair reveals yet another part of the relationship. The FTC has documented repair restrictions involving design, parts, repair information, diagnostics, and software locks. Manufacturers also raise concerns that may motivate some restrictions, including safety, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and improper repairs.[6]

The strongest conclusion, therefore, is not the most dramatic one. Repair restrictions exist; some may have legitimate purposes. The question is: Do these restrictions protect something that truly needs protecting, or simply leave the buyer with less control over something already purchased?[6]

None of this, by itself, reveals a hidden master plan.

It reveals something simpler: The relationship between buyer and business can continue long after the sale, and its terms may matter as much as—or more than—the price that began it.

More Valuable Than the Purchase

Once payments recur, repairs stay controlled, and switching becomes costly, the dynamics of the relationship change.

A customer can become valuable not only for today’s purchase, but for tomorrow’s payment, attention, information, and decision to stay.

Companies openly value this. Adobe has described its strategy to investors in terms of growing a recurring and predictable revenue stream. There is nothing scandalous about that.[7]

Predictable revenue can support investment, employees, product development, and continuing service.

Nor are subscriptions inherently suspect. Netflix primarily derives revenue from monthly membership fees for streaming services. Continuing payment can correspond to continuing value.[8]

The meaningful distinction is not “one-time good, subscription bad.” It is whether value continues flowing both ways.

A company may keep customers by serving them exceptionally well. Another may retain customers because leaving has become confusing, costly, or inconvenient. Both produce retention. They do not produce the same relationship.

That leads to a useful question:

Am I staying because this still serves me, or because leaving has become too costly?

Choice Is More Complicated Than It Looks

Modern consumers see enormous variety. Shelves, marketplaces, app stores, streaming services, and financial products offer countless names and options.

But visible variety doesn’t always align with underlying structure.

Brands may share parent companies. Companies may be acquired while retaining familiar identities. Public companies may have major institutional shareholders whose holdings overlap across competitors.

This is where discussions about BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street often outrun what the evidence permits.

Large asset managers can hold significant voting stakes across many public companies, giving them meaningful influence through proxy voting and corporate governance. But ownership is not management, voting influence is not operational control, and holding shares in competing companies does not mean secretly running them as one enterprise.[9]

The effects of common ownership remain debated. Some research finds meaningful effects on managerial incentives and product-market outcomes; other work questions how large those effects are, and recent reviews conclude that a consensus has not emerged.[10, 11, 12]

We do not need that debate settled to recognize a simpler truth:

Modern ownership is often more interconnected than the consumer-facing marketplace appears.[9, 12]

That is context, not verdict.

Understanding who owns something can help us understand what we are supporting. It cannot, by itself, tell us whether the product is good or the company worthy.

Profit Isn’t the Discovery

Businesses seek profit. A business that cannot sustain itself cannot continue serving people.

Profit can come from making something better, solving a problem, lowering costs, improving service, or building something people genuinely value.

So the question is not whether a company profits.

The question is how.

Additional profit may come from greater value. It may also come from new fees, reduced service, reduced repairability, increased advertising, greater data collection, or a relationship that becomes more difficult to leave.

Seemingly obvious examples deserve scrutiny too. Recent research on packaged foods found meaningful declines in average package size, but the popular picture of shrinkflation—the same product simply becoming smaller—explained surprisingly little of the change in that dataset. Much of it came from smaller new products replacing older ones.[13]

The dramatic explanation was easier.

The evidence was messier.

**We should prefer the messier truth. ** Profit can be the fruit of excellent service. It can also reward practices that leave the customer giving more and receiving less.

An increase in profit tells us very little.

What produces it tells us much more.

You Don’t Need a Conspiracy to Produce a Pattern

A system does not require a mastermind.

If subscription revenue proves more predictable than one-time sales, businesses notice. If ecosystems increase customer retention, competitors build ecosystems. If consumers respond differently to package-size changes than to visible price increases, companies can learn from that. If data improves advertising, advertising businesses have reason to collect useful data.[7, 13, 4]

Nobody needs to coordinate. Nobody needs to wake up asking how to harm the customer. Similar incentives can produce similar behavior.

Once a profitable model works in one industry, others may adopt it. That does not mean every company shares the same motive or produces the same result.

It means the better question is often not:

Who is controlling this? But: What does this system reward?

A marketplace that rewards serving people well can produce extraordinary things. A marketplace that rewards obscured costs, dependence, or extraction can produce those too.

Most likely, we live among both.

Discernment means learning the difference.

Look Again

So I encourage you, look again—not suspiciously, but carefully.

Who makes what you buy? Who owns it? What else are you giving besides money? If you wanted to leave tomorrow, what would it cost? If something broke, could you repair it? If the terms changed, could you reasonably say no?

And when a company receives more value from you, are you receiving more value from it?

These questions will not always reveal something wrong.

Sometimes they reveal good fruit: a company improving what it sells, a subscription worth renewing, a durable product, an easy cancellation process, honest data practices, or support long after the sale.

Discernment is not cynicism. Its purpose is not to teach people to distrust everything.

It is to recognize what deserves trust.

Sometimes we are buying a product. Sometimes we are entering a longer relationship.

Either way, the question should not end with: Is this worth the price? Ask one more: What fruit does this relationship bear?

Then look. Discern. Not with cynicism, but with curiosity.

You'll know them by their fruit.

• Lowen

Sources & Bibliography Citation note: Numbered citations identify externally verifiable factual claims. Interpretive and editorial statements are generally left uncited unless they depend directly on a source.

[1] Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Seeks Public Comment in Response to Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking Regarding Negative Option Marketing Practices.” March 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/03/ftc-seeks-public-comment-response-advance-notice-proposed-rulemaking-regarding-negative-option

[2] U.S. Department of Justice & Federal Trade Commission. 2023 Merger Guidelines. December 18, 2023. See discussion of switching costs. https://www.justice.gov/atr/2023-merger-guidelines

[3] Hannan, Timothy H. “Consumer Switching Costs and Firm Pricing: Evidence From Bank Pricing of Deposit Accounts.” Federal Reserve Board, Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2008-32, July 2008. https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/consumer-switching-costs-and-firm-pricing-evidence-from-bank-pricing-of-deposit-accounts.htm

[4] Federal Trade Commission. A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services. September 2024. https://www.ftc.gov/reports/look-behind-screens-examining-data-practices-social-media-video-streaming-services

[5] Procter & Gamble. “P&G’s Focused Portfolio.” P&G 2026 Annual Report. https://us.pg.com/annualreport2026/pg-focused-portfolio/

[6] Federal Trade Commission. Nixing the Fix: An FTC Report to Congress on Repair Restrictions. May 2021. https://www.ftc.gov/reports/nixing-fix-ftc-report-congress-repair-restrictions

[7] Adobe Inc. Annual Report / Form 10-K for fiscal year ended November 28, 2025. See discussion of Annualized Recurring Revenue and Adobe’s recurring and predictable revenue stream. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/796343/000079634326000003/adbe-20251128.htm

[8] Netflix, Inc. Annual Report / Form 10-K for year ended December 31, 2025. See revenue discussion of monthly membership fees for streaming services. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1065280/000106528026000034/nflx-20251231.htm

[9] Bebchuk, Lucian A., and Scott Hirst. “Big Three Power, and Why It Matters.” Boston University School of Law Faculty Scholarship, 2022. https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3344/

[10] Antón, Miguel, Florian Ederer, Mireia Giné, and Martin C. Schmalz. “Common Ownership, Competition, and Top Management Incentives.” Journal of Political Economy 131, no. 5 (2023): 1294–1355. https://doi.org/10.1086/722414

[11] Gilje, Erik P., Todd A. Gormley, and Doron Y. Levit. “Who’s Paying Attention? Measuring Common Ownership and Its Impact on Managerial Incentives.” NBER Working Paper 25644, 2019; published version in Journal of Financial Economics. https://doi.org/10.3386/w25644

[12] Gerardi, Kristopher, Michelle Lowry, and Carola Schenone. “A Critical Review of the Common Ownership Literature.” Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Working Paper 2023-17; later published in Annual Review of Financial Economics. https://doi.org/10.29338/wp2023-17

[13] Rojas, Christian, Edward Jaenicke, and Elina T. Page. “How Package Size Changes Affect Food Inflation: Evidence from Scanner Data.” International Journal of Industrial Organization 105 (2026): 103261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijindorg.2026.103261