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The most surprising part of this story to me is that someone manages to make millions of dollars on bird feeders.
by m0zg 7y ago
The most surprising part of this story to me is that someone manages to make millions of dollars on bird feeders.
- themagician 7y agoRevenue, not profit. You can make millions on just about anything. It’s not hard. Making a healthy margin is something else entirely. 3P sellers don’t really care. If they make $5,000 on $1.5m in revenue it’s fine. They don’t do any real work. They are just middle men. They just try to do as much as possible. The item doesn’t matter, the customer doesn’t matter. If their is a listing and they can sell against it and make a few cents per sale that’s good enough. Amazon has created a horrible race to the bottom model and they don’t care either because they benefit as well.
- RandomTisk 7y agoI got my folks a bird feeder a few years ago when they bought a new house. I grew up a few miles from there, remembering only sparrows, blackbirds, robins, etc and on rare occasions a yellow bird, or a brown bird, or red-wing blackbird. But with a bird feeder, it was amazing to see the number of unique birds that show up now every few minutes, birds of all colors that I didn't even know lived in the area.
- perl4ever 7y agoI was in a home improvement store and noticed that a sparrow had found its way to the aisle with the bird seed.
- LegitShady 7y agowhy does a home improvement store have bird seed/
- chihuahua 7y agoBecause these stores usually have a garden section, and bird feeders and bird seed are usually stocked in a garden section of a store. Presumably, the people who solve the optimization problem "given the amount of space available and the buying habits of our customers, how do we optimize our sales volume" have concluded that bird seed is one of the thousands of items they should stock.
- perl4ever 7y agoYes, and I thought it was interesting that the birds (or at least some of them) had solved the problem of "how do we optimize our bird seed consumption" by going to the source instead of a backyard bird feeder.