People in the middle are totally squashed and being squeezed out, which I believe is how this thread started. There are too many cooks and nearly every market is totally saturated. In the 70s education was seen as the way out, but now even that is becoming totally irrelevant with many kids needing a degree just to be a barista.
I disagree with your notion the bigger you are, the harder you fall. This country is now so dependent on companies like Woolworths, Coles, BP, Shell, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc that if they fall then everyone is going with them. We all live in a house of cards.