There's degree to unethical behavior, but I've become disillusioned and no longer thing it's an outlier on the market. Some things I've seen:
- When writing the paragraph you quoted the beginning of, I had mostly particular situations involving large corporations in mind. You see such shenanigans featured regularly on HN, and if people are outraged, they aren't really surprised.
- People I know personally worked in "pedestrian", small-business areas like e-commerce, customer service, shipping&handling, grocery stores, restaurants and medical care. I've heard plenty about practices that are common in these businesses - like bribing people to remove negative ratings, blatant copyright violation on promotional material, washing stale food with detergent to remove the smell and selling it as fresh, microwaving food and adding burn marks and then selling it as grilled, etc. Minor and major issues.
- Then there's plenty of companies like Groupon or AirBnB that an ethical person would shut down, or at least heavily rework their business model, upon learning how big a negative impact they have on the market at large.
- Then there's the whole advertising industry, which turns a lot of otherwise friendly interactions into adversarial experiences.
A lot of this is caused not (just) by ethical deficiency of people involved, but through market pressure. Consider grocery stores washing stale food: I don't know of a worker who's happy about it (but they do this, or else they lose jobs). I'm convinced managers aren't happy about it either - but they have an inventory that will otherwise go to waste, and they need to figure something out or else it's their job.
My standard of ethics is that of friendly cooperation. That standard is routinely broken in interactions with businesses, big and small (and I do my best to keep trading with businesses that do not break that standard). Thus I conclude it's the market at large, and not some occasional bad actor.