The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

« Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet-people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the numbers of these shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see in his operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the most shoes they had to make and the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result - collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out. Those few who had the right genetic instability mutated into birds [...] who cursed their feet, cursed the ground, and vowed that non should walk on it again... »

Volume Two in the Trilogy of Five (D. Adams)