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> This is the central myth of the free market. Tell Sears and Kmart that it's a myth. Top US retailers in 1970: Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, McCrory's, WT
by adventured 7y ago
> This is the central myth of the free market.
Tell Sears and Kmart that it's a myth.
Top US retailers in 1970: Sears, Pennys, Kmart, Woolworth, McCrory's, WT Grant, Genesco, Allied, May, Dayton-Hudson (Target)
Only one of those remains on the list now (in an entirely different form at that).
The Internet has changed nothing fundamental about whether a retailer can be replaced by competition. And no, Amazon's warehouses don't make it impossible to compete with any more than Sears previously having thousands of physical stores supposedly protected them via reach / scale that others couldn't match. For retailers, the Internet is a better catalog. Sears rode the last version to temporary dominance, Amazon rode this version to temporary online dominance.
- sigstoat 7y agoand more generally than retailers: http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2017-only-12-remain-thanks-to-the-creative-destruction-that-fuels-economic-prosperity/ http://www.aei.org/publication/fortune-500-firms-1955-v-2017...
- aalleavitch 7y agoThe myth here, though, is not that companies are taken out by competitors with better technology or more ruthless practices or better PR, that happens all the time. The myth is that when this happens it is always in the customer’s best interests, or that the customer will even be allowed to become aware of what their own best interests really are. For a company there is no difference between genuinely benefitting their customers and manipulating their customers into believing that they have been benefitted. Making that determination falls on the customer themselves, and in the competition between global corporation and median consumer the consumer is wildly out-matched.