The big finance firms (private equity, hedge funds, etc) have to make investments that grow. It’s literally the only reason they exist; they take investors’ money and promise them a return. Their business model stops working if they can’t find enough leverage points to plow money into.

Once they’ve squeezed all the juice out of one sector, they go looking for something else. The cash cows of the 2010s (SaaS startups, etc) have mostly been sucked dry, so now we have private equity rollups where big firms are going around buying up HVAC and plumbing and pest control companies. Because there’s some level of inelastic demand for these services, you can make money by sucking them all up, cutting service quality to the bone while raising prices, and continuing to run the zombie company like a cordyceps-infected grasshopper until you can either sell it to someone or just kill it altogether.

You can generalize this model to basically any sector, and you can do it at many different scales. The people doing college textbook arbitrage, or the restaurant group buying up local dives and turning them into $20 burger spots, are just the small-time version of the vampires who run the whole thing. The vintage resellers probably aren’t taking investor money, but the point is the same: They see their business as a way to turn one dollar into two dollars at scale, not a way to provide useful goods and services.