like I went to taco bell and they didn’t even have napkins out. they had the other stuff just no napkins, I assume because some fucking ghoul noticed people liked taking them for their cars so now we just don’t get napkins! so they can save $100 per quarter rather than provide the barest minimum quality of life features.
People haven’t learned to vote with their wallets
As was once said(something like): if vote with your wallet, the people with bigger wallets get more votes.
Capitalism: a short story.
Yep that’s true, but I think in the long haul appealing to more people is better than just one
Sounds like a weird saying.
It assumes that the people with bigger wallets also use a larger portion (absolute money, not percentages) on the “thing” to begin with. If the billionaire and the middle class man uses 10€ on the same thing a month, and both stop doing it, then they both got the same amount of “votes”. Much more fitting would be: “if you vote with your wallet, people who spend more money get more votes”.
Of course this only applies if you’re talking about boycots etc, and not about buying stuff.
And yes, people with bigger wallets probably have more sway and power when it comes to get getting their way if they want to, but when people talk about voting with your wallet, they’re not talking about this.
“if you vote with your wallet, people who spend more money get more votes”.
as i said “something like”, but overall it’s the same idea, semantics.
Of course this only applies if you’re talking about boycots etc, and not about buying stuff.
It applies in both cases, for example the design of a product (game Diablo 4) or the process of gentrification.
No, this line of thinking is wrong, I wish people would stop saying this. Voting with your wallet never works when 1% has >50% of wealth. It’s easier for 5% of people (wealthy, top execs) to agree on milking the rest than 95% of people to agree on boycotting a certain brand. That’s why we have regulations, we wouldn’t need them if “voting with wallets” actually worked.
Free market capitalism got us to this point, it cannot take us out of this.
1% might have 50% of the wealth, they do not account for 50% of the spending. Especially not at Taco Bell.
Pure capitalism is broken af, but companies like this will feel it if 10% of costumers stops going there. The increase in price can recover some of it, but only to a certain extent. It’s a simple supply and demand issue.
That being said, I’m not from the US, so take my opinion on local issues with a grain of salth. And I definitely don’t mean to imply that wealth inequality is not an issue. On the contrary.
You mean well and I wish you were right, but capitalism proves you wrong time and time again. Remember when everyone cancelled their Netflix subscriptions and the company went bankrupt because they disallowed account sharing? Yeah, that was the sentiment on all social media.
Nobody did that in net change numbers.
If your theory was right, Netflix is succeeding because Saudi billionaires from the 1% bought up thousands of Netflix subscriptions to make up for the average Joe from the 99% that unsubscribed.
What really happened was that when they added household restrictions they saw a net increase in subscriptions, not from the 1%, but from the 99%.
While the concentration of wealth has significant effects on opportunity and access to capital, it means pretty much jack shit to access to revenue, which is dictated by mass spending and very susceptible to voting with your dollar.
We literally just saw a company hit hard by people voting with their dollar, with one of the largest alcoholic beverage companies taking a significant loss because they pissed off two sides of the market with their behavior, with effects still going on today.
We’re in a generation of complacency. Nobody cares and our to busy consuming to care.
A sizeable chunk is too busy surviving.
I mean, you would save a lot more money if you did 2 seconds of research by comparing prices before you buy things and also avoiding unnecessary expenditures like convenience foods like Taco Bell, junk food, and carbonated beverages.
It’s amazing to me how many people let themselves get nickel and dimed to death because, “it’s only $20.”
The system is working as intended.
Hard to do that when everything is a fucking oligopoly. If you don’t like Taco Bell, have fun also avoiding KFC, Pizza Hut, and The Habit, all owned by Yum! Brands.
Go to your locally owned Mexican restaurant instead.
Stop letting advertising direct your purchasing intent towards mega-corp brands.
Well you know all those boomers retiring ? They not doing work anymore but that’s not the worst of it. Now they are spending that retirement money instead of stashing it.
So they’re selling their stocks and now the companies need cash or demonstrate profit growth or else their share prices will tank.
because somehow our economic system says that a company is only successful if it’s growing, not if it’s regularly turning a profit every quarter. at least, that’s my understanding of it. so, they have to do something to generate something that looks like growth somehow
Huggies went up in price, but their cost of manufacturing actually went down.
It’s got nothing to do with profit margins, it’s just pure greed. Also, the law requires that publicly traded companies be greedy.
nothing to do with profit margins, it’s just pure greed
???
Maybe I should have said “it’s nothing to do with maintaining profit margins” against rising costs.
Gotcha, that makes sense.
Also, the law requires that publicly traded companies be greedy
The law doesn’t actually state you need screw over your customers and maximize profit. It says that executives have a fiduciary duty, which means they must act in the best interest of the shareholder, not themselves.
That does not mean they have to suck out every single dollar of profit. Executives have some leeway in this and can very easily explain that napkins lead to happier customers and longer term retention which means long term profits.
It’s purely a short-term, wall street driven, behavior also driven by executive pay being also based in stock so they’re incentivized to drive up the price over the next quarter so they can cash out.
Yeah sure, but then you could also say the same about a private business. The CEO works for the business owner, whether the owner is private or public stockholders.
But the reality is that publicly traded companies end up being far more greedy and profit driven than private businesses. In particular, the greedy private businesses tend to taget an IPO, while the more conscientious ones remain private.
Lack of competition against an embedded brand name. Change brands.
The brands shuffle their designs to stay ahead of IP laws. Gillette made the definitive shaving razor in 1901, the patent subsequently expired and anyone could make it, now they make new razors every few years to stay ahead of the curve.
With nappies, the correct answer is reusable nappies. It sounds gross, but when you’re a parent you quickly learn to deal with all kinds of shit.
You also get funky designs and stuff. The insides are interchangeable, the oustides are fashion.
when you’re a parent you quickly learn to deal with all kinds of shit.
Depends if you have a second washing machine because you’re now creating a new waste and different expense. Also depends on how much time you have and every dual income family answer the same. None. So no the generalisation that reusables are the solution is not accurate at all. I’d prefer biodegradable nappies any day. The washing machine goes over time as it is with the 14 outfit changes every day.
2nd washing machine?? How many people do you know with 2 washing machines???
“Biodegradable” is a marketing term.
I’m not knocking people who use disposable (biodegradable - HAH) nappies, but that doesn’t mean that washing reusable nappies is something impossible for most people. If anything, disposable nappies are a relatively new invention.
Maybe with current electricity prices the maths has changed, but washing reusable nappies worked out far cheaper for me when my kids were using them.
Actually at least two families who have small children AND reusable nappies.
I don’t care for the “marketing” I mean it from the actual definition. Plus where I live companies are held to account for label based claims. So sounds like a US problem tbh.
So you have small children and both parents are working? Notice the plurals. We found with one baby it’s easy enough however the moment we both went to work and even more so with two babies it was impossible extra workload. Out of the friends and families in my circles the ONLY (2 families) that use reusable are the ones with a dedicated stay at home parent. Which is becoming rare more than ever.
How does the law require them to be greedy?
I just assumed that it was shareholders.
Not technically a “law”…
“The shareholder wealth maximization doctrine requires public corporations to pursue a single purpose to the exclusion of all others: increase the wealth of shareholders by increasing the value of their shares. However, a company should be committed to enhance shareholder value and comply with all regulations and laws that govern shareholder’s rights.”
The" however… " part is largely ignored, except for when it benefits shareholders.
The “however” part you quoted explicitly mentions following the rights of shareholders. From what you described, there’s literally nothing else in the doctrine to ignore.
Maybe not an exact law to be greedy but aren’t they legally responsible for acting in the interest of the shareholders not the consumer
Because stocks kept trading at higher and higher P/E ratios essentially saying “the market thinks this company can make much more money in the future than they are making now.”
The problem is, most companies couldn’t, and as we have hit a recessionary phase those companies are now scrambling to try to show continued growth justifying their price.
The way they do that is by cutting off their limbs and selling them for short term cash at long term consequence.
So you see them cutting costs in all kinds of ways that screw over their customers but can show quarterly profits. Even though it means customers may not stay customers if better options appear.
So we are in this sort of pendulum swing period where large corporations suck because there’s effectively no competition that doesn’t and sucking is the last way for them to squeeze water from a stone. The natural solution is that we’d see competition rise up that doesn’t suck to take their customers away and force pro-customer changes.
This likely will eventually happen, but it’s going to take time. There are emerging tech trends that will accelerate it, but are still a few years away from practically changing the equation.
In about a decade things should suck less, and a number of the crappy companies around right now may no longer be around, but in the meantime it’s still going to suck for a while yet as things adjust to the dying of the old guard and birth of the new.
I disagree on your expectations for improvement, though agree on the rest.
There are lots of markets with natural barriers to entry were there isn’t any realistic chance for a new competitor to arrise and even if one did thanks to, say, some new technology, they’ll almost certainly only “disrupt” until they became well established and then do the same as all the rest because that maximizes profitability (just look at Uber a decade ago and look at Uber now).
Then there are lots of markets were crooked politcians (which nowadys seems to be most of the ones in the mainstream parties) make sure there are artificial barriers to entry so that well-connected companies are protected from competition - pretty much any market were an operating license is required, such as Banking and Mobile works like that - and that too means no costumer-friendly competitors will arrise in such markets, ever, because the gatekeeping which is in the hands of said crooked politians stops them before they even start, and said political gatekeepers couldn’t care less about consumer-friendliness of market participants and they’ll only change their ways if forced to politically and that’s not going to happen in countries with voting systems designed to maintain a political duopoly such as the US were the politicians rarelly fear losing their positions, especially on complex hard to explain things like how consumers suffer from them “maintaing high artifical market barriers to entry”
In the old days, before neoliberalism got entrenched, you might have such natural or artificial monopoly or cartel markets occupied by a Public company, which due to the lack of competition quickly grew inneficient (in my professional experience the same happens in Private companies in such a situation, by the way), though cheap, and on which there was often political pressure to improve. Now you have them occupied by Private companies who are driven solely by profit-seeking, so it’s still shit (because they cut costs) only it’s also expensive for customers rather than cheap (because they try to squeeze costumers with high prices) and suffers zero political pressure because the politicians hide behind the “It’s a Free Market” to refuse to regulate whilst secretly waiting for their Non-executive board memberships as rewards for being “friends of business” - a wonderful example of all this are Railways in the UK.
this sort of talk will get you killed in the revolution, fair warning.
🙄
I don’t really agree with this. It is the answer that I think classical economics would give but I just don’t think it’s useful. For one, it ignores politics. Large corporations also have bought our government, and a few large wealth management funds like vanguard own a de facto controlling share in many public companies, oftentimes including virtually an entire industry, such that competition between them isn’t really incentived as much as financial shenanigans and other Jack Welch style shit.
Some scholars (i think I read this in Adrienne bullers value of a whale, which is basically basis for this entire comment) even argue that we’ve reached a point where it might be more useful to think of our economy as a planned economy, but planned by finance instead of a state central authority.
All that is to say: why would we expect competition to grow, as you suggest, when the current companies already won, and therefore have the power to crush competition? They’ve already dismantled so many of the antimonopoly and other regulations standing in their way. The classical economics argument treats these new better companies as just sorta rising out of the aether but in reality there’s a whole political context that is probably worth considering.
Good point well made. I think it’s usually naive wishful thinking (for a “just world” that makes sense and is going to be OK, actually) that allows a liberal capitalist apologist to point to classical economics and say “see the companies are hurting,” but the companies don’t have feelings, and the owners and shareholders are feeling just fine.
I woukd say it’s even worse than that: Free Market only works if humans behaved in a certain way (the so called homo economicus) which has long be disproven by Behavioural Economics and in Markets with low barriers to entry (i.e. teddy bears or soap, not railways or internet service provision) and even then it can’t deal will systemic problems (basically any Negative Externality such as Polution or Greenhouse Gas emissions, or over consumption of share resources - a.k.a. Tragedy of the Commons - such as with overfishing or in depletion of mineral resources).
People have been fed by politicians and think-tanks with shaddy funding an oversimplified theory that sounds amazing if you do not at all dig into the details, whilst not actually working in reality, not even close, but of course you’re never be told that by the people who win the most from the system built on top of this theory.
(It’s actually funny how this is the Capitalist mirror of Communism: beautiful high-level theory, never worked and can’t work in practice - because people are as they are, the physical world is as it is and human systems work as they work - and the people whose priviledges come from the system created to implement said theories will never ever tell you they don’t work and never will even after a half a century experiment: in fact they’ll just tell you it’s only not working as expected because it has not been done with enough “purity” and hence we need to double-down to make it work)
It’s because of the napkin gnomes. Nobody can ever catch them.
- Collect napkin
- ???
- Profit
Shareholders. Part of me thinks they see the writing on the walls of climate change and want to just get the most they can out of the rest of the short time we have left.
because it is not designed to be good but just to make money
Maybe they are out of them because some ghoul took all of them to clean their car? One self entitled customer.
It’s a pretty complicated economics question why inflation is happening. They’re working on it by adjusting interest rates, I guess.
As for why the average American isn’t doing so well, it’s basically the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer. If this same inflation was happening with a 70’s distribution of wealth (and IIRC it actually did) it wouldn’t be fun but it wouldn’t be pushing so many people to the brink, either.
The trick is they do this because “you” keep showing up. Spend literally 30-45 minutes to make a pile of taco fixings that will taste better, be healthier, and be cost competitive (if cooked in bulk).
Went to McDs for the “convenience” of an egg sandwich the other day. Was told to pull into spot #1 to wait. TWENTY MINUTES LATER they brought the food and couldn’t muster anything resembling an apology. So I guess I’ll be making my own fucking egg sandwiches from now on.
Sounds like you should be making your own breakfast sandos from now on!
Each day I want breakfast, I make myself a bacon and egg on toast sandwich. That takes me 11 minutes to make, and costs me under a dollar using local suppliers.
Not only does it not taste like hyperprocessed greaseball garbage like McDicks is, I also don’t have to drive to get it!
Welcome to the rest of your life. You’re gonna have the best brekkie sandos
Exactly, why would they even put napkins out if the customers still come.
Fiduciary responsibility, number has to get bigger
We really can vote with our dollars. The issue is that we don’t (I’m point right at myself here).
Don’t buy the things, we probably don’t need em.
Taco Bell will just put out a “napkin tipping” jar and blame lack of tips for not providing napkins.
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It won’t happen until there is another fourth meal option
