You write this as if corporations don't lobby on behalf of their owners, and as if 'trying to sell you something' couldn't be any more dystopian than someone at a store counter greeting a prospective customer.
Corporations lobby governments to provide security, in part because some corporations want to sell security products and governments (at multiple different scales) are the biggest customers for that. Those who do not themselves sell security sometimes demand security not so much for the safety of customers and staff as for the customers that they would like to have. Security is big business. Before dismissing this as some marginal phenomenon, you might want to reflect on the proportion of the economy that revolves around security. Though a few years old now, this article raises a number of surprising questions that I've yet to see effectively answered: https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Glenn_Lo...
Corporations lobby governments to provide security, in part because some corporations want to sell security products and governments (at multiple different scales) are the biggest customers for that. Those who do not themselves sell security sometimes demand security not so much for the safety of customers and staff as for the customers that they would like to have. Security is big business. Before dismissing this as some marginal phenomenon, you might want to reflect on the proportion of the economy that revolves around security. Though a few years old now, this article raises a number of surprising questions that I've yet to see effectively answered: https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Economics/Faculty/Glenn_Lo...