To that point - didn't these companies and their investors "invest" in a bunch of human resources and then devalue them by either laying them off or giving the

To that point - didn't these companies and their investors "invest" in a bunch of human resources and then devalue them by either laying them off or giving the work of laid-off workers to the remaining resources? If executives at a company rented a bunch of store fronts expecting to increase their footprint and then said "we're bad at our jobs and didn't realize we weren't going to do anything with these store fronts" the investors would (presumably) ask them to leave or cut their performance bonuses. It's not like these companies don't have massive amounts of data (I'm looking at you Google) to analyze and estimate a market and determine if they needed the resources to begin with. Another thing I don't see mentioned often enough is the impact that this has on state governments. I can imagine that the people working in the California state government would be concerned if several large companies took a bunch of store fronts off the market and then just dumped them all in one fell swoop. Are these managers, executives, and presidents so bad at their job that they can't find anything to do with a bunch of talented employees that they spent time and money on-boarding?