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Oh, TeaPigs? With the dachshund mascot on the Darjeeling Earl Grey, and the brown-paper boxes, and the overpriced wares? Yeah, you can get those everywhere; th
by fennecfoxen 10y ago
Oh, TeaPigs? With the dachshund mascot on the Darjeeling Earl Grey, and the brown-paper boxes, and the overpriced wares?
Yeah, you can get those everywhere; they're clearly _way_ too mass-market to be properly independent. If you're spending cash money the on indie feel of things, you'll be buying BigCorp sooner or later. Better to just buy quality.
> Then... where do you draw the line? Is private equity backing problematic when its obfuscated? Or just contract primacy?
Well, we're taught that the free market is efficient only when you have property rights, low barriers to entry, and low transaction costs. While monopoly issues get most of the antitrust press, I suspect that a lot of the other things people don't like about BigCorp world and the gig economy is the way that high transaction costs around hiring, firing, and most especially, contracts of all sorts. Any time these issues are complex and involve expensive lawyers, BigCorp tends to win. It's at the roots of a lot of problems these days.
- madaxe_again 10y agoYeah, them - they're essentially an independent business unit of Tata global. One thing that I found consistently interesting was that more often than not, their employees thought they were working for a small, independent business - and the principles would often use "we're only little" in negotiations. When you manufacture a reality for long enough it becomes real - at least, real enough in the minds of beholders that any opposing reality is dismissed as priggish or jealous.
- jacquesm 10y ago> If you're spending cash money the on indie feel of things, you'll be buying BigCorp sooner or later. Better to just buy quality. Most of these start out as quality. Then what happens is that during some survey BigCorp finds out that SmallQualityCorp is nibbling away at their sales & profits and then the next thing you know SmallQualityCorp has been acquired by BigCorp.
- Neliquat 10y agoSee: Snapple
- madaxe_again 10y agoAlthough what you find frequently is that SmallQualityCorp was started by BigCorp at arms length with a view to bringing them under the umbrella once they have traction. "Sports nutrition" (the "what the hell do we do with all this cheese making byproduct industry") is rife with this - there are only two suppliers, and many, many brands and offshoots. It happens in retail, too - you see a single entity pushing multiple seemingly independent brands to target different market segments.
- viridian 10y agoThen how is MyProtein so much cheaper than like everyone else?
- madaxe_again 10y agoVolume over per-sale margin. It's the exact same stuff from the same suppliers as you'd get buying a premium brand like Sci-MX etc.