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Is my company shutting down? >> All right, I I have really bad news, everybody. Uh effectively [clears throat] immediately ceasing all operations. We're filing for bankruptcy.
>> This is uh where we are in society. That's eight pieces of chicken and some rice for $15. $15. Does anybody else have the feeling like there's not going to be any restaurants left?
>> Really feel like until they bring the cost of housing down, we should all just move back in with our parents. Like that should be our form of revolution.
>> Corporate bankruptcies are the highest they've been since 2010 after the Great Recession. And yet corporations are posting record-breaking profits. Something's not adding up.
>> This is probably a dumb question, but if AI replaces all the jobs and people can't work, therefore they can't earn money, therefore they have no money to spend, then what is the use of people having money in the first place and of all these billionaires having companies and things with things that they can't sell because people can't buy them?
>> This must be the most asked question on the internet. And for good reason, we need money to buy products. But the answer to this question is the reality that we are already living.
>> Doritos selling for $7 a bag ended up costing PepsiCo billions. That is the headline here. Yeah. Uh according to Bloomberg News. Uh probably not big enough for a main, but uh right now PepsiCo So, it's actually going to slash prices by up to 15% on some of their salty snacks after sales plunged and the company missed internal revenue targets for 2 years in a row.
>> So, the idea they learned that if we charge people $7 for a bag of Doritos, they won't actually buy those Doritos. Is that the idea?
>> Is that demand destruction?
>> It's exactly what it is.
>> [laughter]
>> Dorito demand destruction?
>> Yeah. Did they have to put this into Claude to figure this out or like a spreadsheet?
>> Did they have to put this into Claude to figure this out? Yeah, surprise, people cannot afford to pay $7 for a bag of Doritos. The Bloomberg article reads, "Walmart has been telling Doritos, Lays, and Cheetos that their prices were too high for more than a year. Doritos at Walmart had jumped nearly 50% from 2021." This comment is spot on. If Pepsi can immediately slash the price of Doritos 15%, that proves that they never had to raise the price to $7 to begin with. They did it simply because of greed. This user posted a bag of Ruffles for $7.29. This is insanity. They want so badly for their bag of chips to be $10. But, raising prices is just one strategy corporations use to increase their revenue. Here's another.
>> Shrinkflation. I came across this old bottle of sunscreen from a couple of years ago. It is 8 fl oz, right? And it's on the front it says biodegradable cruelty-free. This is the sunscreen, the exact same sunscreen that I bought a week a week and a half ago. Mind you, new bottle. I bought it this year. It expires on November 2026. It is 6 fl oz. No more biodegradable and cruelty-free. Uh this was probably under $10. I paid about $15 for this. But, they have the nerve to say that it's 20% more than the 5 fl oz. I hate it here. I hate it here.
>> Shrinkflation has been going on for a while, but now it seems like it's every company's go-to strategy. But, we notice. We're not stupid. Someone said, "When iPhone stopped coming with the charging box, I knew." Yes, this is why I refuse to buy a new phone. Another person said, "Cars not coming with a spare tire anymore." And if they're not increasing the price or shrinking the product, they're lowering the quality.
>> I hate that we're living a time period when restaurant food is simultaneously absurdly expensive and also aggressively mediocre. Like, when did this happen? I used to love eating out. It used to be one of my favorite activities of all time. Now, I genuinely, without irony, think to myself that whatever I make at home tastes better than any something else I order out.
>> Starters now cost as much as the actual meal, even though none of the food is actually made from scratch anymore. This comment is revealing. Restaurant owner here, it happened when Sysco and US Foods basically eliminated their small competitors. Now, they own 80% of the market and raised prices 30 to 75% year over year. If you don't know, Sysco is a food supplier and they used to supply whole ingredients so restaurants could cook fresh meals. But, now restaurants opt for pre-made frozen food like this bag of liquid eggs that gets microwaved and served at hotel breakfast buffets. We don't even know if the eggs are real. From 2020 to 2025, chain restaurant prices rose 39%, nearly double the rate of inflation, but that greed is catching up with them. Restaurants are now empty at peak hours. Regular families can't afford the price gouging. This, of course, eventually leads to restaurants closing.
>> Fast food giant Pizza Hut now closing hundreds of its locations. 250 nationwide, to be exact. The problem, they say, declining sales.
>> Pizza Hut's parent company, Yum! Brands, says it's considering various options for that chain, including a possible sale.
>> Companies are officially pricing out their own customers. Products, services, everything is becoming unaffordable, which begs the question, if nobody can afford their products, who is going to buy them?
>> There have been many tour cancellations. [ __ ] Riot Dolls canceled all but one of their North American dates, and Post Malone canceled his first two dates and delayed a number of others. In some of these cases, the artists are citing medical reasons. Kid Cudi recently canceled a Birmingham, Alabama show and also said plainly, "Ticket sales just weren't strong enough." Page Six is calling this trend blue dot fever, referencing the blue dots showing available tickets on Ticketmaster. Ticketnews.com explained, "The pattern is becoming familiar. An artist announces a tour, sales sputter, seating charts turn into an ocean of blue dots, and then a personal reason emerges for pulling out."
>> Ticketmaster uses dynamic pricing to squeeze out as much money as humanly possible. But, when they do this, the artists cancel their shows. They're not going to play to empty arenas. In response to the empty seats, someone said, "Nobody has money." 49,000 likes on this comment. Someone else said, "Read the room. We can't afford groceries." And because of Ticketmaster's greed, this doesn't just harm the artist, it hurts everyone who would have been hired to do the show. Security, ticketing, food, and merch sales. All of those jobs gone because Ticketmaster couldn't price gouge enough people to fill a venue.
>> The economy is so bad right now. You can really see that it's hitting everyone from pretty much every background. It's just really, really bad. I know people who have been unemployed for well over a year. And I've seen people like making jokes and stuff about Spirit Airlines shutting down, but the reality is that's like it says 17,000 because Spirit has 17,000 employees. But, I saw someone else saying like they actually work for a printing company and their client is Spirit Airlines. So, like this is going to ripple out.
>> 17,000 Spirit employees just entered a job market that was already stagnant. And like he said, every company that worked with Spirit just lost Spirit as a customer. Someone commented, "Just turned 36. I make a little over $100,000 and just moved back in with my parents because I cannot afford housing in New Jersey. A similar comment, I make $100,000 now. I was able to afford more in 2012 when I made $55,000. And this one, I work for a bankruptcy firm. We are booming, which is not a good indicator. And they're right, corporate bankruptcies keep hitting highs not seen since the Great Recession with the last 2 years being especially brutal. These are just some of the bankruptcies from this year. QVC, Saks Fifth Avenue, Popeyes through its major franchisee, Carbon Health, Eddie Bauer, Twin Hospitality, West Marine, the list literally goes on. Corporate greed was stealing jobs well before ChatGPT.
>> Recession indicator I haven't seen anybody address this at the gym. It doesn't matter what time it is anymore, it's always busy. It's just busy. Nobody's supposed to be anywhere no more. Nobody has jobs. Nobody has jobs. So it's just every We're all here. What the [ __ ] bro? It's 12:00 on Monday. Do y'all not have jobs? Oh my god. Go home.
>> I'm a millennial, baby, and I know a recession when I see one. And I'mma tell you one of the biggest recession indicators is the gym being packed out. Baby, it's giving New Year's resolution every single day, okay?
>> All these creators pointing out the same thing. People at the gym at whole hours of the day seemingly because no one has a job. Someone commented, "You're there, too." The creator responded, "I'm unemployed, though." So far in 2026, roughly 63% of all job growth came from the healthcare sector alone. In fact, without healthcare creating jobs, job growth would have been negative in recent years.
>> This is genuinely the worst economy to hate your job in. Like every day I want to quit, but every day I'm reminded, if I do quit, I won't even be able to afford a million Like at this point, it feels safer to just be unhappy than to be unemployed. We've never lived in times like this.
>> If you have a job right now, the advice online is unanimous. Do not quit your job. This comment reads, "I regret quitting my job. I can't even get a job at Burger King, and I have a degree. Guys, do not quit." Someone else said, "I don't hate working. I hate working to still not be able to afford anything." I know I already discussed Pepsico at the beginning of this video, but they really are the perfect example of everything wrong with corporate America. Not only did they increase chips to $7 a bag at the end of 2025, they announced another round of layoffs, and that came after they had already cut 450 workers and shut down two Frito-Lay plants in Florida. Their greed checks every corporate cost-cutting strategy. Raise prices, shrink the product, lower the quality, lay off the workers. This is why we don't have jobs, and no one can afford anything.
>> The real reason that everyone wants to be a business owner, or an entrepreneur, or a drop shipper, or a content creator, is because you literally cannot afford to live anymore by working for someone else.
>> Companies keep raising their prices so they can make more money, which raises the cost of living, which means we need to earn more money that they don't want to pay us. Every year, it's the same thing. Make it make sense. This comment sums it up. I work for a billion-dollar company, Bass Pro Shops, and they pay me $18.50 per hour. That means I can afford $700 a month max for housing. I can't afford to move out of my parents' house. An employee working full-time can only afford $700 per month in rent. So, what can we find in the US that's priced under 700? Here's a place in West Plains, Missouri, population 12,000. This place is priced at $550. What a steal in a city that has no people. And they have the audacity to say, "No pets." But what about the founder and CEO of Bass Pro Shops? Well, he's a billionaire with an estimated $8 billion net worth. But he's not alone. Over the past 40 years, executives have been paying themselves lavishly. The Economic Policy Institute found that from 1978 to 2024, top CEO pay shot up 1,094% while the typical workers pay rose just 26%. Their pay has grown over 40 times faster than ours, but they can't figure out why we now can't afford to buy their stuff. And I know we have cycles of economic downturns, but this one is hitting everyone. Blue collar, white collar, working class, whatever you want to call it, everyone is feeling it.
>> During the 2008 recession, people got creative. And when I mean creative, I mean things you really wouldn't believe. People were now willing to let strangers sleep in their home just to make ends meet. It's when Airbnb was founded. Surprisingly, households actually started going to the grocery store more often because they were extreme couponing. 25% of households started couponing in 2008. Many households actually went back to bartering as well. People were trading haircuts for babysitting, plumbing work for meals. What's something you or your family did uniquely during the recession?
>> I recently asked my mom, who was born in the '70s, if she'd ever experienced an economy this bad because in 2008, nothing really changed for us. We didn't have a big fancy house or some lifestyle that we needed to downsize. Life just continued. And she said, "No. In her lifetime, she has never experienced an economy this bad." Someone said, "My family was poor, so we didn't realize there was a recession." Exactly. Someone else said, "My apartment then was $650 for a one-bedroom. I could live on my own on a CNA salary. This recession is wildly different. The only people living it up right now are the top 10%.
>> This economy is so bad you'll be sitting here thinking you're bad with money and all you did was buy food. That's it. And not luxury food, regular food. Just survival items. You check your bank account like, "Who did this?" It was eggs. Eggs did this. You didn't splurge. You You didn't treat yourself. You just needed to eat more than once a day. People give advice like, "You just budget better." For what? Air? I love when banks send the alerts like, "You've spent more than usual on groceries." Yeah, I noticed. I was there.
>> When people feel buyer's remorse for purchasing groceries, food, something is deeply wrong. This comment is spot on. My favorite part is after you spend $50 on four items, they ask you to donate. Why doesn't the store donate their money as they are seeing record profits? Total greed. This is exactly the problem. Greed. And greed existed long before AI did. So, when people ask what happens when AI takes all jobs and no one's left to buy anything, we already know. We're watching it happen. Companies laying off their workers and increasing their prices, leaving only the rich to buy their products, is not a balanced equation. But, that's the silver lining in all of this. This cannot continue. They are literally pricing themselves out of business. The math doesn't math. Greed is a choice, and that's what they're choosing. But, we can choose where and how we spend our money. Ultimately, the power is with the people.
>> What's your personal recession indicator?
>> I ordered food last night, opened the door, delivered by a white woman.
>> I just saw a man snatch a purse this morning.
>> A purse?
>> One of my best friends, who's a real estate agent, just told me that he wants to apply to law school.
>> The sugar daddies in my DMs have stopped offering me $5,000. One of them reached out and asked me if $400 was okay.
>> Back in my day, the scam texts used to be like, "You want an iPhone? You want a gift card? Here's your free card." Now they're like, "Do you want a job? Do you want a job that actually pays your bills? I bet you do. Click this link."