We've seen this, explicitly, in HOA management and landscape/irrigation contractors.
Had 2x management companies "Wall-Streeted" with buyouts. Service quality plummeted.
Dumped them and found a privately owned firm - it's absolutely night-and-day w/ the service, and costs are actually LOWER.
Same deal w/ landscapers - had a good family-owned biz that was bought out. Within months, their service went to shit. We have several crabapple trees that never got irrigation turned on, and we're withholding >$20k in outstanding payments to them until we find out if those trees survive next spring. Hired a former manager from the original firm and getting good service like we had before the buyout.
Wall Street buys stuff up, because they cannot figure out how to "start" any business, so they just "streamline" things they can buy, destroy the customer service and rake in $$. And when they have markets cornered in areas, that's what you are stuck with. Eventually, smaller biz can step in to start taking accounts from them, but that can take years.
Our HOAs will no longer hire any company for services that is part of a larger conglomerate - we're only looking for privately owned stuff, because we've experienced the shitty services over the past 5 years, and gotten burned by them, badly.
