I believe McDonalds is still somewhat independent in it's sourcing. IDK about wendy's. But Burger King is absolutely just another Sysco reseller at this point.
That means a lot of the smaller burger stands end up just selling the same stuff as every other burger stand. Food that tastes a lot like my high school cafeteria did (hint, also Sysco).
The only real lever any food business can pull is in facilities and staffing. The price of the food is fixed and there's no real competition to be had.
and: true across the board, not just restaurants...
This is also simply the natural end state of free market capitalism. Every one of these giant businesses knows that by swallowing up smaller competitors they can ultimately improve their revenue without improving quality or actually innovating/competing.
Companies like sysco should have never been allowed to merge with other distributors and they should absolutely be broken up.
Internally, these huge corporations behave exactly the same as a good old fashioned USSR bureaucracy:
endless meetings where no work gets done
a huge class of bureaucrats (manager, senior manager, VP, senior VP, director, senior director ... what's next? commissar? secretary?) who don't actually do any of the line work and instead exist only to perpetuate a process
huge amount of process that does nothing for the bottom line or indeed for anyone at all
random party lines that you must accept or be fired (new director came in. Now we're doing a 30 minute velocity retrospective every week. you must attend, comrade!)
party language determined from on high, that changes once every 5 years (blockchain is our five year plan! huh? blockchain? no no, AI is our five year plan!)
party princelings who rise not on merit but purely on positional signifiers alone (Comrade, I know you've been a party loyalist for 25 years, but your senior director position is being given to a new princeling. He's 26 years old. He came from Stanford, and was on the forbes 30 under 30. They say he was a protege of Peter Thiel!)
and, most importantly: everyone at the bottom, who pays for all of it, and must take it completely seriously.
As frustrating and corrupt as our market economy is, the oppression under regimes like the USSR and East Germany was unimaginably worse.
That being said, yes -- we badly need another round of legislative reform like the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and all the regulatory actions that followed.
There's not a private business on the planet that's super-efficient.
https://www.morningstar.com/company-reports/1327868-sysco-re...
If you start looking at the distribution centers of these companies and the competitors, you get a pretty clear picture of how concentrated things are.
The drop off for the distribution centers of the top 3 is stark. [1]
Lack of communication to outsiders and visitors about those that compete against such establishments is key. The larger organizations have more capital to advertise and help capture that economic arena.
Personally, when I travel, I go out of my way to find local establishments over large franchises because the former slowly siphons out the local economy to some CEO that gets paid millions. The latter helps keep the competition local economy health. I haven't given Starbucks a penny in over 7 years and plan to never fund their organization ever again.
In general though the ease at which the market can recall a brand has a direct connection to market share, loyalty and in turn pricing power.
Economy of Scale is powerful.