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How is it that even with retail as an industry collapsing, a chain like Ross Dress for Less is not only still around, but growing? I've had the misfortune of wandering in to 2 of their stores, and I've never understood how they get by on a business model that seems to be "like a garage sale, except with a storefront."
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May 3, 2017 18:24
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withak posted:It's probably like banks where there is no expectation that a branch brings in enough sales to pay their rent, they are just there as huge billboards and the revenue comes from somewhere else. Nah, a significant portion of mobile stores are independently owned (or at least part of independent retailer groups) so this wouldn't fly. New lines (especially business accounts), accessories, and, to a lesser extent, upgrades are where stores are making their money. You keep costs down by being able to run the business pretty much wherever the cheapest rents are, and not paying your employees very much.
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Mar 5, 2018 21:49
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icantfindaname posted:I've seen several libertarian-y people say that these tech companies aren't really monopolies because they're not raising prices, standard economic theory says monopolies should raise prices above market value. Well, now the monopoly rents are flowing, this should end any doubt about these companies' nature I'm curious, what is the market rate for a streaming service that also offers unlimited 2-day shipping on drat near anything?
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Apr 30, 2018 23:27
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KingFisher posted:Just how would you break up a Amazon? This assumes that the only antitrust action that exists is to reduce the power of an effective monopoly, which is bullshit. Breaking up monopolies is a blunt instrument and it’s probably not all that relevant in an industry like Amazon’s, where folks essentially duke it out for second place behind the clear market leader. But putting safeguards in place and enforcing conditions could force a whole lot of good to get done while Amazon takes over the planet. Force them to make non-voting investments in competitors. Dedicate a percentage of gross income to Main Street renewal projects all over the country. Prevent them from getting products from manufacturers at lower prices than their competitors, which still lets them take advantage of their infrastructure but means they can’t just run up the board in all aspects of the supply chain. Make them donate to charity, or whatever the gently caress. Just ensure the money has to be spread around a bit more before it gets to god-king Jeff Bezos. Now sure, these all take active oversight, but that is probably what needs to happen at this point. Baronash fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 01:49
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:This is what I not understand of this whole "break up Amazon!! wait not that it is not practical but do this instead" thing people keep bringing up. Why should not these rules apply to all business, if you want to apply them to Amazon? It would already be of a very tough project to get any of the new restriction applied to Amazon by itself, so should not the politics effort be to make the uniform regulation? nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:But also what is the point of faking old time downtown either. Much of those Main Street is dead because town hasn't grown in whole century if it's lucky has lost 90% of population in century if it isn't. Just let them be demolished and go help all the people who live in the city and the suburb around it, they need it more of. Do not make silly "main street renewal project funded by percentage of amazon income". Make a tax for all companies, and use that tax to run government services, use it to build public houses, use it to feed the people, it benefits hundreds of millions instead of benefiting only a few and propping up some random small town businessman's rent-seek. These aren't mutually exclusive. And Main Street renewal was something I threw in there after about ten seconds of thought, but if you're saying that money being directed to everything from symmetrical fiber to daycare facilities is not beneficial to a business community and local plebs, I don't know what to tell you. Baronash fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 04:07
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nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:I do not understand why you are saying this. I ask you why your proposal is "Amazon only should not be able to do this business practice" instead of "no company should be able to do this business practice". Because the subject of the discussion I was replying to was antitrust action against Amazon, not "how do we solve all problems from all businesses." nepetaMisekiryoiki posted:How is faster internet and daycare supposed to fix a town with 300 persons and was last relevant in 1928. That is why the main street is dead, and you will not bring it back. Uncle John General Store and the single screen movie theater did not close because they couldn't be a YouTuber with their upload, it closed because the town over got a real supermarket and multiplex yes? Listen I saw recently an blog that touch on why one does not wave the wand and revitalize small town in nowhere that was not able to become suburb, even though it mostly speaks of it for creating tech-job as solution: https://emilymaier.net/words/why-cant-big-tech-be-in-cheap-cities/ As I said before, I put about 10 seconds of thought into "Main Street revival" before I threw it in the post. It certainly has flaws, it's not a magic bullet solution, and I'm not interested in defending an offhand suggestion anymore. The crux of what I was saying in the OP was that breaking up Amazon is probably a lovely solution, and that there are better ways to penalize their size that could do a lot of good. If you think that oughta be a tax, then great. Baronash fucked around with this message at 13:37 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 13:32
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DrNutt posted:
Or we can do multiple things simultaneously and let the subject of an antitrust case against Amazon be just a small part of fixing poo poo. Like, how the statement "let's take Amazon's money and do some good with it" is controversial is beyond me. If you're really hung up on 6 words I gave as a dumb example, then you're missing the forest for the trees. Baronash fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Oct 17, 2018 |
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Oct 17, 2018 15:48
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If that's how you save America maybe it's best to just let it die.
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DrNutt posted:I'm sorry, not in disagreement with doing something with Amazon, just what I bolded. Please give me the death of capitalism before I have to suffer the existence of more "consulting" firms. Ah, sorry to jump down your throat.
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Oct 17, 2018 15:54
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JustJeff88 posted:If the boffins see that they sell 1.1 million subscriptions (obviously a very low number used for comparison purposes) at $100 US per but predict with their algorithms that they will only lose 10% of customers and sell 1 million at $120 per, then they have a fiduciary duty to do the latter because it's more profitable. This is some bizarro world bullshit. Corporations don’t have a responsibility to maximize their quarterly profits over all else. Short-sighted business decisions are the result of short-sighted C-levels, not regulations that would prevent them from implementing loss leaders, R&D, or loving paid vacation. Baronash fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Dec 31, 2018 |
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Dec 31, 2018 03:11
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Golbez posted:Are you new here? To capitalism? Did you bother reading the other 3 sentences, or were you too excited about laying this sick burn? “Fiduciary duty” has a specific legal meaning, and corporations aren’t obligated to maximize profits. This is an especially weird topic to get hung up on when the subject of the conversation, Amazon, generates relatively razor thin margins because the majority of their earnings are reinvested into the company, which has been a major factor in their position as the market leader.
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Dec 31, 2018 07:13
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JustJeff88 posted:Meanwhile, there's the airline who was punished after the CEO gave the employees - you know, the people who do all of the work - a meagre cost of living increase after years of stagnant wages up against inflation. Their stock price decreased sharply and JP Morgan downgraded their status from neutral to overweight. Revenue doesn't count as profit if it's paid out to employee salaries, so they are objectively punished for not maximizing profit when they gave that money to their employees and not their parasitic shareholders. “If you ignore the parts of what I said that were wrong, then I was completely right!”
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Dec 31, 2018 07:35
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Mr Interweb posted:So i know she was against it, but again, the deal was supported by nearly every major democrat in NY. AOC breaks conservatives' brains. She probably had little to no influence on it, but her opponents can raise money and attract support by claiming she did.
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Feb 19, 2019 06:36
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Whole Foods is pretty much a giant "gently caress you" to sustainable agriculture so news of their possible expansion is pretty depressing.
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Apr 11, 2019 00:48
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Liquid Communism posted:Why am I not surprised it's those two Kramering up to defend condemning a bunch of office workers to die. There are more than enough capitalism horror stories that you shouldn't be feeling the need to have the dumbest take on a situation. Like, a few people got thrust into a terrible situation with basically no precedent and made a decision based on ensuring safety for their occupants and access to the south tower for first responders. It's kinda hosed to Monday morning quarterback that situation 18 years later. e: f, b
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Jun 1, 2019 04:48
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pseudanonymous posted:The economy isn't like an ecosystem or some other weird metaphor. You could easily simply outlaw advertising. It wouldn't "severely" gently caress up society. It wouldn't even gently caress up society. Some industries would have to change their business model, that's it. Even ignoring the obvious 1st Amendment concerns, through what mechanism would you ban the act of telling other people about a thing you make or a service you provide? Advertising wouldn't stop, it would just morph into whatever form is still permitted under the new system.
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Jul 14, 2019 21:32
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JustJeff88 posted:How do they keep people from "stealing" that content? I don't mean piracy, I mean keeping that content locally even after a subscription has terminated and possibly duplicating it for other people. I would assume some sort of online verification process even if the content isn't actually being streamed in real time, but that still requires a connection sometimes. The downloads have varying expiration dates.
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Jul 15, 2019 17:22
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Baronjutter posted:I feel way more secure just having a huge external hard drive with all my media on it. Shows, movies, music, it's all backed up there. If a service only lets me stream rather than having an actual file, it's off to torrent-town. You absolutely can! You can buy a Blu Ray and trivially rip an exact copy, with the added benefit of a digital download code that'll work across a ton of platforms if you want to stream it at any point. Music is even easier, with just about every major online platform willing to sell you DRM-free songs.
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Jul 15, 2019 17:33
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i am harry posted:Speaking of, did you know that in other countries, after your one-year phone contract runs out (where incoming calls and texts are not counted against your arbitrary limits), they just give you a new phone of your choosing if you agree to renew, whereas in America, after your two-year contract expires, you’re presented with the same bullshit “upgrade” options as a new customer that doesn’t even have a loving login, which amount to an overpriced, full-price phone, or an even more expensive monthly lease, because gently caress this place and everyone in it? Hey OP, I don't know what's wrong with your account but it's reposting comments from 2009.
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Jul 30, 2019 00:54
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PT6A posted:But at a Home Depot or a Best Buy where there's tons of employees, yeah, there should be at least one around at any given time that can answer a moderately in-depth question about any given product. But it's management's responsibility to make that happen. PT6A posted:Well then I guess you have to pay money to get an expert, or send a non-expert for training at your expense. Them's the breaks. Hardware chains aren't going to do this because relatively few customers actually think the 25 year old/octogenarian stocking the shelves knows anything, and the idiots who do will bitch about it for a little bit but ultimately make the purchase because there isn't a better option. I was one of the clueless 20-something Menards employees. The only training I was offered was online and had to be done on personal time. Even then, it was mostly poo poo like organizing endcaps and how unions are bad and Obama is killing businesses (I'm not joking). People with experience are expensive, and you don't become the richest man in Wisconsin by laying out the red carpet for construction workers. Baronash fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Dec 20, 2019 |
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Dec 20, 2019 17:28
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ErIog posted:Large businesses want to pick their customers, and it's more efficient to take out the bottom tier of the transactions rather than try to foist price hikes evenly on the entire customer base. Netflix did this a year ago with the password sharing policy change. They saturated their market with lower prices to get people in the door. Now with everyone in the door, they want the customers who are willing to pay more to stay. This allows them to hike their prices substantially more in the long term while reducing overhead serving people who can't pay as much. It isn't a very good business decision, but it sounds amazing to investors. What on earth? This is an absolutely bizarre reading of Netflix's strategy. Netflix wasn't trying to reduce its subscriber base, it was attempting the exact opposite. They saw people who shared a password from someone else's account as potential subscribers, and tried to capture some of them by removing the ability to easily share accounts. If they were just looking for the richest subscribers, they wouldn't have spent the last several years adding multiple price tiers (including their ad-supported plan just last year) to attract subscribers in every income bracket. I don't think anyone but Netflix can speak to how successful that has been, but it clearly isn't compatible with the strategy you claim they're employing. Separately, the notion that they could reduce their subscriber base as a means of easily reducing overhead is, I think, based on a pretty poor understanding of where they're spending their money. Their single biggest expense is their yearly spending on content, which they clearly feel is necessary to remain competitive with other streaming services. Fewer customers doesn't mean they can get away with a smaller content catalog, since their customers' tastes will likely be as varied as before. Baronash fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Nov 16, 2023 |
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Nov 16, 2023 04:06
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e: Nvm, misread.
Baronash fucked around with this message at 00:46 on Dec 10, 2023 |
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Dec 10, 2023 00:41
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ErIog posted:Your view of this doesn't make sense on paper. Netflix kept ratcheting prices on the service until it was painful to them, and then after that, took the step of kicking off "free riders." You can't both raise prices and make a volume play in the market at the same time. That really doesn't make sense. People who never bothered to buy in when it was cheaper are suddenly going to buy now that it's more expensive and access is cut off? Meanwhile.. torrenting still exists. It's madness. Well done ignoring the post you quoted, I guess. They spent the last few years adding price tiers, including the ad-supported one with the intent of grabbing customers who otherwise would find their service too expensive. This is the exact opposite of what you're claiming. If they were trying to get rid of their lower-income customers, they wouldn't have introduced that ad-supported tier just last year.
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Dec 19, 2023 21:00
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ErIog posted:No, that's not actually what happened. You talk about tiers, but ignore the fact that what bought you full Netflix before now buys you a lower tier. They did add tiers. That's fine. Those tiers weren't actually price-competitive. This is a complete 180 from what you originally claimed: ErIog posted:Large businesses want to pick their customers, and it's more efficient to take out the bottom tier of the transactions rather than try to foist price hikes evenly on the entire customer base. Netflix did this a year ago with the password sharing policy change. They saturated their market with lower prices to get people in the door. Now with everyone in the door, they want the customers who are willing to pay more to stay. This allows them to hike their prices substantially more in the long term while reducing overhead serving people who can't pay as much.
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Feb 16, 2024 15:18
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ErIog posted:That's not a 180, and the link I posted proves you wrong. The only time they ever added a cheaper tier was the ads tier at $1 less than what standard Netflix (w/o ads) used to cost. Every other time what they did was charge users more and more, and then eventually buckle to demand for better pricing by giving a worse version of the service. They're not trying to attract every segment of the market with that pricing. They're specifically concentrated on making everyone pay more and telling users that won't buy-in for less than $7/month to gently caress off. Price of service on every other tier has doubled, and the content selection has gotten worse. Are you genuinely arguing that offering a service 11 years ago for 7.99 and offering today for 6.99 are practically the same? Do you also complain that McDonalds won’t sell you a 15 cent hamburger like it’s 1948? I never said their prices haven’t risen, they obviously have. That’s what tends to happen when your business model changes from licensing the streaming rights for Battlefield Earth and CSI: Miami reruns to spending $200 million a piece producing your own star-studded blockbusters. The selection of non-originals has also certainly gotten worse, as more companies are getting into the streaming game and hoarding their content for their own platforms, but that has basically nothing to do with your original claim. Your argument started at “they’re actively attempting to kick off lower-paying customers in an effort to cut costs and build a premium service” and has been walked back to “well, prices rise sometimes.” Not sure why this was worth ironing out 2 months later, but 
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Feb 20, 2024 06:01
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