As organizations grow and become BIG, they have a tendency to move from a focus on people, to a focus on numbers. And the competitive trend is that they would rather make 50 cents each on a million sales than $50 each on 10,000 sales, even though the bottom line is identical. The automated "50 cents each" option tends to preclude people because you can't go to the supermarket and get anything for 50 cents.

And that's how a lot of individual people are going broke, or close to it, even while "the economy" is allegedly doing well, or so the economists tell us.