Could not be any more clear really.
Can confirm my prices do go up and down with my costs and all kidding aside my rates to customers history looks like the price of oil except substantially more volatile. Itās bonkers.
In the last 18 months I have seen literally the lowest inflation adjusted prices in the history of trucking and the highest inflation adjusted prices in the history of trucking. Calling it a boom-bust cycle is underselling it.
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Is it? This isnāt just amazon because whenever you buy online they can have UPS, USPS, Fedex ship (and Amazon uses those services too), but overall isnāt it less expensive to have delivery trucks with well mapped out routes doing all the driving instead of every consumer driving to every store? (even before taking the consumerās time into account, but surely after) (and I mean the total cost to consumer- not just price of the product)
Overall itās hard to calculate, but when it comes to the cost per pound or cost per cbm (depending on whether you want to measure volume or weight, whichever one is worse for you is how youāre going to get priced lol) the way it works is ocean/barge ā rail ā truckload ā Less than Truckload ā parcel. At each stage the cost rise by a factor of 3-4x (except that itās 10x from ocean/barge to rail and only 50% from rail to truck) and by the time it reaches parcel itās very expensive indeed.
I have a hard time believing that having delivery vehicles deliver individual packages is more efficient overall than having people go out and run errands where they load their car up and then come home, but thatās possible I guess. It might be an overall time savings if people are spending a lot more time shopping than I do.
I think itās pretty safe to say that we all consume more crap when the time cost of buying it approaches zero rather than having to get in the car and go buy it. The additional consumption and the additional freight cost should count against it IMO.
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Tiger arm extenders?
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johnnyās echo is a problem
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/07/amazon-sidewalk-network/
You donāt see anything fishy about a corporation that owns the Amazon marketplace and AWS having a net profit margin of 5.5%? AWS has an operating margin of ~30% and the 3rd party marketplace services are >50% of Amazonās total revenue and are doing quite a bit better than that 5.5% (although itās a few more steps to figure that one precisely out than Iām willing to take).
The answer is that they are out there ālosingā that money offering products below cost to consumers to buy market share in god knows how many different spaces on any given Wednesday.
Also we have the flippers doing the outgoing parcels on the other side of the equation. There were several of these people in my condo with multiple parcels going out every day. Karen that lives next door to you is an increasingly larger percentage of this game.
Iāve only made it to post #30 and I agreed with all of them. It seems like I am easily convinced.
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Yeahā¦ the lot of the small businesses in the orbit of big business is not great. Everything looks good initially, but they change the terms as soon as youāre pot committed as standard operating procedure.
If anyone ever wonders why the life of the contractors (and their employees) who work for large corporations is so bleak itās because the big corporations are run by āefficiency expertsā whose big skill in life is lying to people about terms in advance and then renegotiating as soon as their counterparties are stuck in the deal to a new much lower cost point. At this point the contractor either can do the same thing to the people he/she pays or go out of business. People do a lot of dark shit to make the new numbers work IME. This is a big part of why so many of the people who are successful in business are such pieces of shit. Theyāre the ones who were willing to do whatever it took.
This shit isnāt capitalismās fault either. Itās the fault of our government for not enforcing commercial agreements in any way shape or form.
One thing Iāve learned about business is that loyalty and leverage are basically the same thing. Iām totally uninterested in business propositions that donāt end in my having leverage over the other party. You want me to sign a noncompete? Cool Iāll need 3x my annual salary as a signing bonus as in until the check clears Iām not signing shit.
As to doing business with large corporations Iāll do it but I refuse to build any kind of ārelationshipā. Every transaction is one transaction and I wonāt build any infrastructure to support their business. I did that once and I lost a fuckton of money. Iāll sell them excess capacity and the day I donāt have any Iāll start ignoring their emails about new transactions.
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Organic free-range hemp tea cozies.
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Ehā¦ my customer base is worth quite a bit. Iām good at operations, sales, and negotiation. If Iām selling itās going to be on my own terms because Iām 100% satisfied with āno dealā. Thatās probably why Iāll never sell, but anyone who tells you theyāre not fattening up a hog for slaughter as they build a business is doing it wrongā¦ or not being honest with at least themselves.
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Every single positive thing about capitalism comes about as the result of healthy competition between people in that business. American style capitalism hasnāt been about competition ever. It has been about rent seeking through vertical integration and/or intellectual property since the founding basically.
I consider myself a small c capitalist, but Iām a all caps SMALL>BIG guy. Iām pretty anti power in general and the reason why microbet and I disagree about basically everything is that I think government is inescapable and the solution to the power problem (with really good systems design) and he thinks governments are bad and unnecessary.
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Grunch. Idk whatās happening but all of a sudden Iām seeing Amazon propaganda on Twitter and recruiting mailers promising $20/hr and $1000 signing bonuses. Itās like weāre being watched.
https://twitter.com/BillBramhall/status/1401926133264916480?s=19
BIG Capitalism vs Small Capitalism? Government doesnāt protect us from BIG C, it protects BIG C from us. You can wish it might be the other way around, but you canāt make that happen ever.
Sure, Iāll vote for government to favor small business and keep big business from monopolies and capturing regulators, but I wonāt get my hopes up about it. I do get to live my own little life and buy and sell where I please to some extent though.
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No matter how the bigness gets structured itās always a problem. If there have to be big entities I would prefer they be government rather than private. I also think that the typical human is stupid, selfish, and violent in a pinch and that violence is the most natural monopoly in existence. The government is just whoever holds that monopoly. You can consent to that monopoly or you can live under a monopoly that you didnāt consent to and thatās literally all Democracy is.
Anarchism is one of those things that I wish worked but demonstrably doesnāt scale. There are going on 8 billion people on earth which means any solution to violence first and foremost has to scale. Government has been a fact of human life since the dawn of agriculture anywhere with any population density and I donāt see that changing basically ever. It sucks, but we have to work around it IMO.
Amazon on the other hand represents everything problematic about large business interests from the way it treats suppliers to the way it treats customers. The costs to society of its power vastly outweigh any benefits.
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I donāt consent. Maybe this is not a democracy.
You consented by not emigrating to a different place with a different system. The fact that you have to pick a government was kind of my whole pointā¦ there isnāt anywhere anyone would actually want to live that doesnāt have one.
There isnāt a no government option, and there will never be one because people suck. Saying āif people were differentā or āif I got the right group of people togetherā it would work is kind of silly because best case scenario your utopia would workā¦ and promptly get steam rolled by a government with an army. There is no way to opt out of the actions of the shitty humans we share this planet with.
I would happily live in Zomia, but I was born here and have lots of personal reasons for staying despite being governed without my consent. Not moving is not consent any more than people who live in a neighborhood ruled by a gang consent to living under their authority.
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Let me know if itās time to nationalize AMZN, Iāll still looking for this Skyhaul parody catalog that I know I didnāt conjure up in my imagination.