> The steelman is that by lowering the cost, more pets can afford better food than what they currently eat. No comment about whether that is reflected in the consumer facing price or in profits.

For your steelman to be relevant it would have to be reflected by lowering the price, otherwise they're just making the product worse for no customer benefit whatsoever and hoping customers take a long time to notice.

And if they were trying to offer a different value proposition by reducing the quality in order to lower the price, the honest way to do it would be to introduce a new product with a different name rather than changing what the product is while leaving the name the same.

And that's before you get into whether selling something as food which is low quality enough to make dogs sick is ethical at any price. It's not like only dogs who would otherwise go unfed will end up eating it.

I’m not defending private equity _at all_, they’re brand-sucking vampires, but all it takes to give some dogs digestion issues is to switch ingredients. I have two that are extremely sensitive to chicken, which is in almost all dog foods due to it being really cheap protein. The sensitivity is pretty common in some breeds.

If they added chicken to the food and it didn’t have it before, more dogs with digestion problems is what you’d get for sure.

That's also the argument for payday loans and subprime lending. I have yet to hear of a poor person's life being improved by by access to credit at 20% interest, aside from the circular argument that easy access to credit inflates prices for everyone to the point where if you take the 20% interest loans away poor people actually won't be able to pay in cash and will demand it back because that's easier than demanding higher wages.

At a certain point you're just asking the consumer "how much are you wiling to suffer before you go without? Let's find out."

I’ve read a more nuanced take of payday loans that makes sense to me. The counterfactual is no loans/credit/banking, not the more legitimate banking and credit services that upper middle class Americans enjoy.

“Would you rather have these services or no services” is how I heard it once.