This is a pet peeve of mine: I understand it can be liberating to blame those greed corporations for giving profit the top priority, but the truth is that corporations never cared because consumers never cared.
We, the consumers, have the nasty habit of looking for cheap before anything else. Whoever tries to sell quality, or to offer his hard-working employees a respectable wage, is painfully bitten by customers moving elsewhere.
The race to the bottom is a bit*h.
Consumers are not valuing cheap over everything else. If I'm unaware of why a $100 bike lock is better than the $20 bike lock and I buy the $20 bike lock that isnt me being cheap. That is the $100 bike lock manufacturers failure to convey the value of their product compared to other, more affordable, options.
All of this is wrapped up in another issue as well. Wealth. I'm at a point financially where I can pick the better and more expensive option. At many times in the past I bought the shit toilet paper because it was half the price and that meant I could stretch my paycheck a bit further.
I'm not going to get into how that could be alleviated but consumers care when they have the financial comfortability to care and when they are aware why they should care.
You were never able to just research how credit works. You needed the bank teller for this.
You were not able to compare prices and service before.
It was critical for you as a necessity that you trusted them.
For consumers our time is much better than it was before.
And yes due to global optimization it's just something bound to happen.
Instead of complaining that we have much better options and are more enabled to do things out way we should start to think how we want to shape the future.
I would love to talk about how we can further enhance the life's of everyone and how we live together than discussed if we still need to support checks.
It's like printed high-quality investigation journalism. We all decry that it's on its way out but the vast majority of us won't consider paying a 300$/year subscription even if most of the HN reader base could absolutely afford it. We just don't want to pay for stuff.
It's the same thing (to a lesser extent) with stocks and investment. I own a bunch of REIT (real-estate trust fund) because they give a great stable return that loosely follow inflation. A few months ago, my landlord increased my rent by 5% I was angry, felt like it was too much etc... but my landlord is very much the result of my investments pushing for inflation-matching dividends. If they don't meet the market expectation they'll just drop in value.
Anyway long story short we are part of the problem.