[deathanatos]

Do they? A large chunk of the market is held by retirement accounts. My 401k doesn't care about staplers, and I would very much value long-term gains over short-term savings.

Collectively, 401k holders don't have much of a voice. I suppose Vanguard might, but even so, retirement accounts are specifically balanced such that they have less short-term risk the nearer they come to fruition, and Vanguard's motive, in theory, should be to provide me with better long-term gains, not short-term savings at the expense of a worse retirement.

I think I want to see a stronger argument for "the shareholders" … and/or these sorts of (idiotic) decisions (that we see far more companies doing than just Google; cf the McD's article that trended earlier where McD is laying people off while beating profit expectations!) would seem to fall squarely on bad management.

[ajmurmann]

Apparently activist investors have been pushing for cost cutting: https://www.wsj.com/articles/activist-investor-calls-on-goog...

I've read that activist investors have pushed for this at several tech companies and even heard theories that that's what actually kicked off the layoff avalanche.

[marcosdumay]

> My 401k doesn't care about staplers

Are you sure?

If it is actively managed, it cares about a whole lot of things that you don't know about. And if it passively invested, it cares about what the average of the active managers care about.