You can always tell when a business has lost its way.
Terri and I banked at the same local outfit for many years. The people there seemed to care. I mean, they were still the dreary old banking folks, and banking has always been about money, of course, but at least you felt like they had your back when you lost your checkbook, or you couldn't figure out how the stupid ATM worked. Then they got bought out.
Got a problem? There's an 800 number where you can listen to the same banal track of "music" for an hour while you wait your turn to speak with the person in God knows where-ville.
You see it everywhere. The family hardware store absorbed into a big-box chain. The neighborhood grocery that became a formula. The restaurant someone opened with a dream that slowly turned into a production line. The original spirit doesn't survive the acquisition — not because the new owners are bad people, but because the mission changed.
My friend, Seth, turned me on to an eye-opening book on the subject, called Enshitification by Cory Doctrow. Worth a read. Thanks, Seth!
When the goal becomes the quarterly number instead of the thing you were actually trying to do, the soul goes with it.
What changes isn't the product. It's the purpose.
When Stan and I started PS Audio in 1973—and then Terri and I again in 1997—we had one thing driving us: bring the magic of music into people's homes. Not sell them a box. Not hit a target. Bring them closer to something that mattered deeply to them and to us. That mission shaped every decision — what we built, how we built it, who we hired, and most important of all, serving our HiFi Family.
Bringing a smile to people's faces.
That's gold to us.
Soul isn't something you add later.
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