This strikes me as one of those things where scale works against incentives. If you own one store, you're making good money. There's little reason to push your managers to try to drive that margin to 810% by eliminating the occasional free pizza.

But when you own a dozen stores (like one of the stories in the article) all you see are numbers, you don't care, you push as hard as you can to "drive efficiencies" and you end up with managers who are getting yelled at because they're at 97% sub-30m delivery instead of the 98.5% goal or whatever. And then you have a manager pulling a pizza out of a car wreck and giving it to another driver.

I think it is also the decoupling from real people doing real job. The farther you go from ground level work, the easier it is to theorize what they could do - whether it is asking drone operators to bomb some place, or set a policy without setting foot in the store on a daily basis, or do a leveraged buyout based primarily on a spreadsheet driven model, the farther you go away from people whose lives are being impacted, the easier it is for you to make decisions that do not think about them.