When Progress Leaves People Behind: A Hard Truth About Modern Business

"Progress moves fast. People don’t always come with it."

I remember the day I realized something was fundamentally broken in how we do business globally. It wasn't in a boardroom or during some high-stakes negotiation. It was reading about ASOS buying Topshop for £330 million while simultaneously putting 2,500 people out of work. That's when sixteen years of working across South Asia, the Middle East, and the UK suddenly clicked into focus differently.

We talk about globalization like it's this great equalizer, right? Breaking down barriers, connecting markets, creating opportunities. And sure, I've seen some of that. But I've also seen the other side—the side nobody wants to talk about at corporate events or investor meetings.

The Deal That Says Everything

February 2021. Arcadia Group collapses. ASOS swoops in and buys Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge, and HIIT. Sounds like a rescue, doesn't it? Except here's the catch: they only wanted the brand names. Not the stores. Definitely not the people.

Out of over 4,500 employees at Topshop and Topman alone, ASOS agreed to take on about 300. Do the math. That's thousands of store managers, sales staff, merchandisers—real people with mortgages and kids and bills—suddenly looking for work during a pandemic.

When reporters pushed ASOS's CEO about keeping at least the Oxford Street flagship open, his response was pretty telling: "It is not our core model to take stores, nor our core strategy, but never say never." Corporate speak for "no thanks, we're good."

And Topshop wasn't even the end of it. Boohoo came along and did the exact same thing with Burton, Dorothy Perkins, and Wallis. Buy the brand, ditch the stores, cut the workers. Rinse and repeat.

What I've Actually Seen

Here's what sixteen years in this world has taught me: globalization and capitalism aren't just running side by side—they're in a full sprint together. And yeah, on the surface it looks like they're working for us. Better prices, more choices, global connectivity. The whole nine yards.

Except when you're the one sitting across the table from someone whose job just got "optimized away," it hits different.

I've worked in South Asian factories where automation replaced entire shifts. I've seen Middle Eastern logistics hubs go from hundreds of employees to dozens. And in the UK? Well, the retail sector tells its own story. Every single time, the script is the same: efficiency gains, digital transformation, staying competitive. Never mind the human cost.

COVID didn't create this mess. It just gave companies the perfect excuse to do what they'd been planning anyway. When lockdowns pushed everyone online, businesses with e-commerce platforms thrived. Traditional retailers? They got carved up and sold for parts.

The Pattern You Can't Unsee

Once you see it, you can't stop seeing it everywhere. ASOS didn't need Topshop's physical stores because they weren't buying a retail business—they were buying digital assets. Brand recognition, Instagram followers, customer email lists. That's what matters now. The actual stores and the people running them? Just overhead to eliminate.

This gets sold to us as innovation, as inevitable progress. But let's call it what it really is: companies figured out they can make more money with fewer people, and they're running with it as fast as possible.

What bothers me most isn't even the job losses, though those are devastating. It's how normalized this has become. We hear "disruption" and "transformation" so often that we've stopped asking who's actually benefiting here. ASOS shareholders did great on that deal. The 2,500 workers who got laid off? Not so much.

The Uncomfortable Question

I've been in enough strategy meetings to know how these decisions get made. Someone builds a spreadsheet where employees are line items. Someone else talks about operational efficiency. Eventually, everyone agrees it's just smart business. And by conventional metrics, it is.

That's the problem, though. Our entire global economy is set up to reward exactly this kind of decision. ASOS did what made perfect sense from a business standpoint. They acquired valuable brands, expanded their market reach, and kept their costs low. Textbook good business.

But those textbooks don't have chapters about the communities that lose their anchor stores. They don't cover what happens to workers in their forties or fifties who've spent their careers in retail and suddenly need to pivot to something completely different. They definitely don't measure the social cost of treating employment as something to minimize rather than a responsibility to take seriously.

What This Really Means

I'm not naive enough to think we can turn back time. Digital commerce is here to stay. Technology will keep advancing. Markets will keep evolving. But after watching this same pattern play out across three continents and multiple industries, I'm done pretending that what's good for business automatically translates to what's good for people.

The ASOS-Topshop deal happened three years ago, but we're still living with its implications. Every retail closure, every "lean transformation," every celebration of going digital-first—it's the same story wearing different clothes.

This isn't just about retail, either. I've watched it happen in manufacturing, hospitality, financial services. COVID accelerated everything, sure, but we were already headed in this direction. The pandemic just made it easier to justify.

Here's What Nobody Wants to Say

Globalization doesn't automatically lift all boats. Sometimes it builds bigger yachts while a lot of people are left swimming. Capitalism, when you let it run unchecked, will always choose efficiency over employment, shareholders over workers, next quarter's profits over long-term stability.

The workers who lost their jobs when ASOS bought Topshop deserved better than corporate platitudes about market forces. They deserved a system that saw them as more than a cost to optimize away.

Sixteen years in, working across borders and witnessing transformation after transformation, I know the business world will keep changing. Technology will keep disrupting things. Markets will keep shifting. But whether that serves actual human beings or just serves capital—that's still a choice we're making, whether we admit it or not.

Right now, globalization and capitalism are indeed running side by side. But honestly? For most workers I've encountered, that partnership isn't working out the way we were promised it would. And those of us who've seen it up close have a responsibility to say so, even when it's uncomfortable.

Because at some point, we need to ask ourselves: if this is progress, why does it feel like we're leaving so many people behind?

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