This isn't perfect, it's a hairbrained 2am thought. But…reading some corporate numbers, I thought about this. And this is extremely simplified, something I know. But…just think about it.
We start with 50 chickens. From those 50 chickens, we get an average of 50 eggs per day (because a chicken lays an average of one egg per day).
But we want growth.
So we buy 10 more chickens and we get 60 eggs per day. This is good. We want more growth.
But now we need to buy more chickens. So we do. We buy 40 more chickens and we see that we now can sell 100 eggs every day.
And we want more…eventually we get to 1000 chickens, laying an average of 1000 eggs per day.
But then we go public and our investors want us to lower our overhead.
So we butcher 200 of our chickens. Less feed, less overhead.
But how do we get our 800 chickens to average 1000 eggs per day? We feed them special feed, we coax and prod them…and we manage to eventually get 1200 eggs per day (it's magic, you know!)
But the investors want more. So we cook 200 more of our chickens and expect 600 chickens to lay not just 1200 eggs per day, but we have to be growing. With less!
So now we have 600 chickens and our investors are expecting 1400 eggs in one day.
But for all our magic, we can't get our chickens to lay 2.3 eggs in a single day.
So what do we do? We bring in 100 “special” (aka low-wage) chickens that cost less to buy, we push them harder, we give them crap food…
And somehow we still think we're going to have 700 chickens laying 2000 eggs in a day.
Guess what? It's very rare for a chicken to lay two eggs in a day. The process takes 24-26 hours (occasionally something goes wonky and it's a little under 24 hours).
Now think of this in human terms. How the hell is it do we expect for less humans to push growth in a company with fewer resources, less pay, and more work to do?
Edit: I didn't think I'd have to say this, so I actually took it out of the post and now I'm putting it back in. This is conceptual. I know that chickens on corporate farms are mistreated. This is not a real-world corporate chicken farm, this is a small 'magical' chicken farm. Because even corporate chicken farms can't force chickens to lay multiple eggs per day, especially with cheaper feed.