22 ms·

What is the unique value proposition of selling honey?

141 points by weinzierl 7y ago

thaumasiotes 7y ago
> Maybe they'll pay their bees better. They'll hire them outright and give them bee benefits instead of having them work as 1099 labor. That'll win a bunch of hearts and minds. "Oh, it's better for the bees, so now we only buy our honey from Willy". I always ask to be 1099 labor, and I'm always told "absolutely not. It'll never happen; completely unacceptable". Where does this delusion come from that W2 status is a good thing that workers want to have and employers want to withhold? Where are these W2-withholding employers?
- moron4hire 7y ago
  The difficulty in finding 1099 arrangements these days for tech companies is that they often want to monopolize your time, which they can't do in a 1099 arrangement. Basically, back in the late 90s or so, Microsoft tried to use 1099s to avoid giving out benefits (such as unemployment insurance) and got hammered by the Labor Department for it. So now most places either put everyone under W2 or are super strict about the number of hours you can work. It basically comes down to who gets to say when you start and stop working. If the company wants to demand a certain set of hours of the day (not just an aggregate of hours during a work period), then the person doing the work is not a "contractor". Contractors are supposed to be able to make their own hours and find any number of clients they wish to fill their time. If the client doesn't like you doing that, then they are obligated to make you an employee.
  - cosmodisk 7y ago
    The mentality of some companies are beyond weird. If I hire a contractor, especially in tech sector, I couldn't care less what hours he does as long as the job is done.If I can't measure what the guy does in x days/month- I'm a tool in here. There are still too many managers out there who think that if a person sits all day staring at the monitor that equates working.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > If the company wants to demand a certain set of hours of the day (not just an aggregate of hours during a work period), then the person doing the work is not a "contractor". Contractors are supposed to be able to make their own hours and find any number of clients they wish to fill their time. This is not true in general; for example, security guards can have contractor status while obviously still being required to show up during their shift and not someone else's shift.
    - culturestate 7y ago
      > security guards can have contractor status while obviously still being required to show up during their shift and not someone else's shift No, the IRS (assuming we're talking about the US) wouldn't allow it - that security guard would either need to be classified as an employee or provide their services to the customer as a corporate entity themselves. The guidelines[1] around this are very straightforward: "Under common-law rules, anyone who performs services for you is your employee if you can control what will be done and how it will be done. This is so even when you give the employee freedom of action. What matters is that you have the right to control the details of how the services are performed." 1. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/independent-contractor-defined https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
      - thaumasiotes 7y ago
        > The guidelines around this are very straightforward And yet your quote doesn't even mention scheduling or the concept of time. > the IRS wouldn't allow that - that security guard would either need to be classified as an employee or provide services as a corporation This is not true. Please don't spread falsehoods in public like this. See https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2016/03/my-new-hero-and-how-the-department-of-labor-bought-me-drinks.html https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2016/03/my-new-hero-and-h... and the link through, https://www.cato.org/blog/four-more-courts-smack-down-obama-administration-workplace-law https://www.cato.org/blog/four-more-courts-smack-down-obama-... . The fact that a job needs to be performed at a particular time is not sufficient to prevent contractors from performing that job.
- dangrossman 7y ago
  Mark is Uber and Barry is Lyft. The bees are the drivers. Uber and Lyft do not want to put them on payroll, while the drivers filed a class action suit saying they should be treated as employees not contractors. Swap in #1 and #2 from any "gig economy" market, same story.
- seanalltogether 7y ago
  > Where does this delusion come from that W2 status is a good thing that workers want to have and employers want to withhold? Where are these W2-withholding employers? The last dev agency I worked for, all designers/developers were 1099 at the start but everyone had to transition to W-2 by like 2009ish. The reason being that Colorado was cracking down hard on companies with 1099 workers. As far as labor board is concerned, if you walk like a duck, quack like a duck, you're a duck.
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willvarfar 7y ago
Perhaps Barry started the rumors? His moat is that he can out-slander every other beekeeper?
- motohagiography 7y ago
  Precisely. It's a race to the bottom and a purity spiral.
danmur 7y ago
Barry and Mark and whoever else can't make enough honey for everyone. The value proposition is that you can exchange for .
mikekchar 7y ago
A long time ago I worked for Bell Northern Research (which eventually became Nortel, which eventually became insolvent). When I started there they had a retirement savings program where they would sell you BNR stock for half price (though you had to have it in your retirement savings). I said "No thank you" and a lot of people thought I was crazy. At the time the company was pulling in $18 billion a year and was making about a 5% profit (later it was found that the "5% profit" was actually accounting fraud but nobody knew that at the time). From my perspective, I looked at the business and realised that we were selling hardware at a 90% margin, but only eking out a 5% profit. Where was the rest of the money going? Well, obviously to a very inefficient rest of the company that included the software developers (me ;-) ). Later it was discovered that it was also being imbezzled, but we didn't know about it at that time... It occurred to me, though, that the only thing that was stopping a company from eating our lunch was that telecom hardware was a capital intensive industry. So you had BNR, AT&T and Seimens capturing practically the entire market, each being as incompetent as the other, but with very little distinction between them. All you needed was a few billion dollars to shake the industry to the core. And, of course, that happened. It took only a couple of years (less than 5 I think) for Nortel to go from 100K employees to zero (with the executives slurping up the retirement fund to pay for their own "retention bonuses", because what would have happened if the executives bolted as soon as bankruptcy proceedings started??? I mean apart from retirees actually getting their retirement money, obviously...) But it's a funny thing because if I were Barry, I would be selling mead. And I would open up a visitor centre in a "Ye Olde Merry England" vibe where you can sample the mead. And I would start an onsite bakery with Knights in Shining Armour theme where I would test out recipes on my customers. And I would make a joint venture with a factory producing confectionary to try to get into convenience stores. And because I would quickly run out of honey to sell, I would buy up all of Mark's honey and eventually just acquire him so that he's my employee. Then I'd fire him because he's mean to bees. But realistically, I think Barry will just be trying to figure out how to siphon a few extra dollars out of the business and into his pocket because starting up new ventures are risky and hard work.
- ainiriand 7y ago
  I want to work for you.
jankotek 7y ago
Honeybees are delicate creatures. If bee hive is not treated well, it gets sick, decreases honey production and maybe does not survive winter. Mark in this story would probably went bankrupt in a few years.
kriro 7y ago
That seems like a pretty unrealistic scenario. I guess it's a thought experiment but positioning (and the existence of branding/marketing) alone would indicate to me that Barry and Mark are not going to be exactly the same. Positioning is always going to be at the very least a soft-moat and especially in consumable goods it's going to be a pretty strong moat (think Coke vs. Pepsi).
- serioussecurity 7y ago
  Uber / Lyft
D_Alex 7y ago
This reads like some kind of allegory, but I really cannot tell for what... But taking it in the somewhat literal spirit: we have a good analogy in the market with free range eggs. Here in Australia, "free range" hens must be kept at no more that 10,000 head/hectare (or 1 sqm of land per hen). This is massively better than battery hens, which are kept at as low as... 0.03 sqm of cage/hen. The animal welfare benefits are huge, battery hens have a truly horrible existence, to the point where I believe that it is immoral to farm them in this way. But some producers are advertising lower stocking densities, some 6 sqm per hen and others even 10 sqm. They are charging a small premium for their eggs, and some people pay it, because they like the idea of animals being treated well. So yes, many people are prepared to pay a bit extra for ethical treatment of animals. Even people (if that where the original post was pointing at).
- beloch 7y ago
  Given the source, I interpreted it as referring to how companies treat their employees (i.e. worker bees). The story suggests that, all other things being equal, consumers might gravitate towards companies with a reputation for treating their employees well. Mark, Barry, and Willy produce the same product at the same price, so how they treat their employees becomes how they differentiate themselves and win over consumers. The problem is, all things are rarely equal and, if they are, businesses usually find ways of differentiating themselves that consumers care more about than happy employees. When Mark starts losing business to Barry, he's going to cut his prices, spend more on advertising, etc.. Treating his bees poorly may actually help him squeeze more honey out of them at less cost, so Barry might not be able to match him without starting to mistreat his bees a little too. Willy's costs are probably the highest of the three, but maybe he can use clever advertising to portray his product as a luxury item that's somehow better than Barry's or Mark's, even if it's identical. If that fails he'll have to choose between happy bees and not going bankrupt. I'd like to live in a world where a virtuous feedback loop would lead to companies treating their employees better and better, but history says that's not the world we live in. We live in a world that has had to come up with labour unions when spirals of mistreatment and cost-cutting got out of hand. We live in a world where executive pay is going stratospheric while employee benefits are stagnant. Perhaps it would be a better world if people cared more about how companies treat their employees, but I honestly don't see how you get people browsing Amazon to choose the honey that's $2/jar more just because it came from slightly happier bees.
fnord77 7y ago
Uber vs. Lyft?
- rachelbythebees 7y ago
  Yes, that's definitely what this is about. Rachel recently quit working at Lyft (the title = "No More Pink Mustache"): https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/02/29/poof/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/02/29/poof/
  - zhdc1 7y ago
    If this is a comparison between Uber and Lyft, I'm not sure I really get it. Platform business models are essentially winner takes all. Lyft's value proposition is that they're number two in a market where anyone who isn't in the top 4-5 has almost no chance of winning. This doesn't mean that they're doing enough to differentiate themselves from Uber, or that they'll ever be able to turn an actual profit, but for the short and medium term game they're more than capable of fending off Uber-copy #27.
- icemelt8 7y ago
  I thought this was Chrome vs Firefox
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dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago
That's why I take all alternatives to Google and Facebook with a grain of salt. Their UVP is to be less evil than the near-monopolies they try to compete with. But they need to make money somehow! The current "common knowledge" is that if they don't profile people, they can't be efficient. That's very wrong. There are many ways to deliver ads to people that might be interested in them without profiling individuals. But the market is too inert, and people too hooked to FB and Google already.
moron4hire 7y ago
I think a lot of the long tail of open source projects are like this, the small treams and solo-contributors. Or at least that is what they put front-and-center. I know I've been guilty of doing it myself. "Our software is better because it's not made by Evilbook Partners, LTD". The natural, default position is to think everyone else thinks like you do. So if you present a solution to a problem, they should value it the same way you do. "I wrote this because I didn't want to do X". But it seems to turn out that most people don't care about your specific X. My last, big attempt at FOSS didn't start that way. When I first started the project, it was the only such project available. But a household-name corp started their own, competing project a year later and all I was left with was (other than a much more complete implementation) some proselytizing about the open web. But none of it could compete with them funding developers out of pocket--while I scraped together contact jobs--to go out and implement their library for other people's projects, write more blog posts than I have hours in a day, and generally just fill the space with "look at us, we're the only dog in town" fake news. I knew their project was nowhere near as complete or easy to use as mine. But I never put the time into expressing that. Well, for one thing they were playing the "we're all one, big, happy community of niche-industry devs" card, so it was impossible to say anything that could at all be considered negative towards them. But I had so much code to write, and code is a lot easier to me than marketing. It would have taken me becoming an expert in their project, when they had no such burden with regards to mine. I let myself get pushed into taking about my project in terms of theirs. Hell, some people even accused me if "wasting time, reinventing the wheel" (to this day, no phrase pisses me off more). Now, I'm just trying to write software for myself. That's all I was ever really doing. The FOSS stuff had no plan, it was just "here's some code, maybe other people will find it useful". While that is often the ur-myth of FOSS, if it were ever true, is just not how projects grow today.
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samdung 7y ago
You got me at "Grocer News" :)
growt 7y ago
> Maybe they'll pay their bees better. As an aspiring beekeeper: Please no! I can't afford to pay 100.000 Bees! We can talk about an retirement plan though, as they all die working.
- Svoka 7y ago
  Pretty sure you're already paying them days off with sugar or something similar.
- bregma 7y ago
  The upside is that all the workers are female so you only have to pay them 70%.
Svoka 7y ago
I don't get it. Is it a metaphor or analogy of some sort? From my experience, analogies usually are a mechanism of manipulation, trying to drag in some arguments which bare facts cannot support.
- itronitron 7y ago
  The author is making a point, by analogy, that consumers make purchase decisions based on a relative ranking of company behaviors and reputation. This is why PR firms exist. Consider what might happen if 'someone' produced a popular documentary on the psychological trauma that YT or FB moderators endure. (If such a documentary already exists I'm sure it will be posted here)
alixanderwang 7y ago
The longer a business is around, the more opportunities to generate some negative press that has some people label them as evil, which is a label that generally doesn't get removed no matter what comes after. It's another reason why startups can win over customers. In general, startups from inception have a squeaky clean image until they get big enough for journalists/bloggers to shit on -- then repeat.
7777fps 7y ago
The way I read this is that companies who are slightly less evil than others are really the bad ones because someone else could come in and be slightly less than them, and then everyone loses? Except if companies are fighting to treat employees better, then everybody wins because conditions get better.
werber 7y ago
I read so many of my choices in that, lyft over uber, my iPhone over an Android, and on and on
tenant 7y ago
All Mark has to do is reduce his price a little. People will then rationalise their decision to buy Mark's honey by telling themselves that if the price was the same they'd buy Barry's because they care about the bees.
- jiofih 7y ago
  Exactly! Then they start a race to the bottom, take up debt, and spend on marketing until one goes bust! By then everyone is buying imported synthetic honey which is way cheaper anyway. Heil capitalism.
  - nostrebored 7y ago
    ... so you're saying at the end of the day consumers got a better product that's ostensibly valuable and accessible?
    - pjc50 7y ago
      They get a product which is worse, but in very non-obvious ways, and has some sort of negative environmental impact that is hard to identify until years later.
      - xaxsacsdaffbnk 7y ago
        They get what they pay for. And here in my capitalist country, "good" honey seems to be selling just fine.
        wayoutthere 7y ago
        The biggest problem with modern capitalism is that you don't know if something is "good" before you buy it. The information asymmetry / obfuscation ensures that.
        xaxsacsdaffbnk 7y ago
itronitron 7y ago
KeyValues stock is rising.
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arnaudsm 7y ago
Thanks to this effect, small food companies are growing fast since the 2000s. "Big Food" is fighting back by doing local-washing: silently buy small companies, industrialize them, then pretend to be local and responsible. Tech has exactly the same problem.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Well aren't they still local then? It doesn't teleport the facilities thousands of miles away.
dougweltman 7y ago
The proposition that ethical sourcing is the differentiator in an otherwise undifferentiated market seems incoherent. If Barry is able to communicate to the market that his honey operation is more ethical, then he can communicate other things to the market as well, irrespective of whether they have any substance or basis in product. Lots of brands of water out there, many different shapes and sizes of bottles. Barry's honey is differentiated, just not in terms of product. Mark can continue treating his bees badly, or he can try to discredit Barry, or he can try to differentiate his product in some way (planting health-giving plants whose pollen they can deposit into their honey). The post imagines only one assumption being relaxed: that of ethical sourcing and the ability to communicate that fact. But in relaxing those assumptions, it is natural to relax others: the power of marketing being foremost. This is a complex system and you cannot change a single variable, or imagine that Mark simply takes Barry's moralistic grandstanding lying down.
- lovemenot 7y ago
  Completely agree with you on supply-side. But Barry need not be alone in his market communication. It is reasonable to suppose that demand-side is also a complex, dynamic system which may respond to diverse communications, including such as in the original post.
perlgeek 7y ago
You don't need a unique value proposition to sell honey. If you sell honey, usually your goal isn't to monopolize the whole honey market. You just sell honey. You might be nearer to some customers. You might be a bit friendlier, or have slightly better marketing. Or people just buy from you because they are used to it. Not every market is a winner-takes-all, and that's very good. This translates to software as well. There are many markets that don't have one monopolist, and space for many players.
- hrktb 7y ago
  > you might be nearer to some customers > have slightly better marketing These two parts are not trivial, and would justify the success of one over the other. Being near customers for a bee keeper requires a decent effort, in particular if the production itself is done near the selling shop. You just don't move your hive in a busy street corner like you'd open a Starbucks. Marketing honey is also the main premise of this piece: what value proposition do you push forward. It will be a world of difference between someone pushing for 'local honey' on TV and someone else pushing for a healthy lifetstyle and building a customer community around that. Overall I feel that the person writing this piece doesn't really like honey much, but I get that it was just some analogy. I wish she took a field she is more interested in.
Frost1x 7y ago
This is crazy... but if you'll entertain the idea for a moment: not everyone who operates a business or sells product/services do it out of profit driven motives. Sometimes, people enjoy the lifestyle of their work and provide a product/service that people want/need/will love pay for. Their business may not be unique, they may not offer optimal prices. Sure, these folks can very likely be undercut because it's unlikely that by these goals alone they're running an optimal process to reduce costs or have the capital to scale things up to points they can attain cost saving advantages. This means their value proposition would be fairly weak. That's fine. People still want honey and maybe they like Mark or Barry or whomever and would rather pay a little bit extra to make sure their local bee keeper is able eat and continue to contribute to their community. One unique value proposition does come to mind however for many of these local artisan style businesses: these people are less likely to abandon small communities. Pure businesses focused on profit motives alone will leave when the situation become unprofitable. People like Mike and Barry are more likely to stay as long as their lifestyle can be maintained. They may even have children who want to continue the family business as is (or not). There are plenty of examples where Walmart, for example, saw opportunities in small rural communities, swept in, undercut the competition and then for one reason or another found it would be best to close the store leaving a vacuum of needs to be met: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/when-wal-mart-leaves-small-towns-behind https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/when-wal-mart-leaves-small... Sometimes the local businesses can rebound but often those local vendors aren't interested in being burned twice. Life is not always about offering the best value proposition. Constantly worrying about optimization in every aspect of life will make you pretty miserable (at least from my experience). At some point you have to choose happy over optimal and understand that's a respectable goal.
- learnstats2 7y ago
  > not everyone who operates a business or sells product/services do it out of profit driven motives. I don't believe that's the case. If you have almost any other motive, running a business is generally not the best way to reach that goal. I provide a service which I am good at and enjoy, and would be prepared to provide to friends for free. Like almost everyone does, in fact. I run my service as a business so that I can keep a roof over my head: that's ultimately a profit motive.
dannyw 7y ago
Bees are users. Honey is data.
zaat 7y ago
What is the unique value proposition of anything? If Barry sells higher quality honey, what keeps someone else from coming in and sell even better quality honey, and for half the price? Oh, you say that it isn't simple to make good quality honey cheaply? Well all the same, it ain't easy to be profitable while providing all your bees with top notch health care too.
- sp332 7y ago
  Yeah but the article is just about being less terrible. Like if an employer is really going out of their way to be abusive. That's when a competitor can get an advantage just by... doing nothing.
- sigmaprimus 7y ago
  I think thats the point of the article, UVP or unique sales proposition is how a company can market their identical product better than their competition. The article suggests that by simply treating bees better, or infact less bad would result in a marketable difference translating to better honey sales. The reality is a successful honey company would employ several UVPs to promote their product and protect their market share. Perfume companies have done this for years, same with beverage companies. Probably the closest analogy would be ethical investment brokers and mutual fund groups who claim that they only put your money into "good" companies. Sure your returns might not be as high but atleast you can sleep well at night knowing your not supporting "evil" companies. One last point, honey is a very unique farm product, other than the initial startup cost and minimal labour there are no other inputs required. Almost every other livestock requires feed, medicine, intensive management etc... Bees are very independent, require very little management and produce an easy to market long lasting cash crop. (Unlike free range chickens, although chickens and bees live well together)
  - bregma 7y ago
    > One last point, honey is a very unique farm product, other than the initial startup cost and minimal labour there are no other inputs required. Almost every other livestock requires feed, medicine, intensive management etc... Ah, the naivete of someone who does not keep bees.
Jedd 7y ago
Aha, hermeneutics. The literal answer is probably found in the law of comparative advantage -- both Barry and Mark should do what they're best at doing. (Arguably this law is one of the handful of non-obvious insights from the science <sic> of economics.) A lot of markets are extremely price sensitive, but, OTOH, there seems to be a growing ratio of informed consumers that are not racing to the bottom, but instead acknowledge that a) almost every action has an ethical component that can / should be factored in, and b) how you spend your money has a greater impact than how you cast your 3-5 yearly vote.
bluedino 7y ago
I was looking forward to a good read about why organic honey is $14.99 for a small jar.
xaxsacsdaffbnk 7y ago
Yes, it is a good thing that competition also operates on "being good". You can't be arbitrarily "good" to your employees, though. You have to improve your business to be able to afford to be better to your employees. That's as it should be.
zajio1am 7y ago
What would Mark do? When Barry offers higher 'ethical value' by treating bees better, then Mark would need to find some different ethical axis on which he excels above Barry (say, has lower CO_2 emissions per jar of honey) and advertise that. Then customers are splitted based on which ethical axis is more important to them and internalized that decision. Now both Barry and Mark can increase their profit margin as customers would not switch to the other 'evil one'.
mwcampbell 7y ago
This is obviously about Uber and Lyft. So I want to drop the analogy and talk about the real thing. I live in Bellevue, WA. I would gladly pay 1.5x the normal rate for Uber in this area to get my rides from a company that (a) is sustainably profitable (b) treats its drivers ethically, e.g. hiring them as real employees, and (c) otherwise has the same rider experience as Uber and Lyft, e.g. booking through an app, average ETA under 10 minutes, automatic payment. Should I expect to pay more? If so, how much more? 2x? 5x? 10x?
- blowski 7y ago
  I don't know if it's "obviously" about Uber and Lyft, rather than any rivalry in which one side's value proposition includes a huge element of "we're not the other side". Could be about Google vs DuckDuckGo, WhatsApp vs Telegram, iOS vs Android, or even Trump vs Biden.
  - jdm2212 7y ago
    The author works (worked?) at Lyft.
- draw_down 7y ago
  Read TFA to find out!
- kaikai 7y ago
  Many taxi companies now have apps, which offer basically that. Similar cost to Uber/Lyft, entirely different model for their workers.
- SamuelAdams 7y ago
  It could also be about the video game industry. AAA studios are known for requiring 80+ hour weeks during crunch time, and there has been chatter among gamers to avoid games these studios produce until workers receive better / fairer working conditions. Of course gamers bought the games anyways, because the loud group who cares about how a game was developed is a small set of the overall audience of that game.
Syzygies 7y ago
I buy honey from http://thehoneyladies.com/biography/ http://thehoneyladies.com/biography/ because they save bees. (Yes, I understand this was allegory, but I took it literally.)
- itronitron 7y ago
  nice gallery on their website, I feel sorry for the construction workers that discovered some of those nests
austincheney 7y ago
The irrelevant value proposition described in the blog reminds me of the panic around this current virus and the hostility when people compare it to the flu even if that comparison is limited to the most boring of facts published by the WHO. People frequently need to exercise a value proposition in defiance of objectivity. Dr Seuss even wrote a cartoon about using that as a tool to manipulate people: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PdLPe7XjdKc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PdLPe7XjdKc
- paulsutter 7y ago
  You might want to read up on what it's like in Italy right now. The issue is not the death rate, the hospitalization rate quickly overloads the healthcare system: https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/1237142891077697538 https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714289107769753... "We’ve stopped all routine, all ORs have been converted to ITUs and they are now diverting or not treating all other emergencies like trauma or strokes. There are hundreds of pts with severe resp failure and many of them do not have access to anything above a reservoir mask. "Patients above 65 or younger with comorbidities are not even assessed by ITU, I am not saying not tubed, I’m saying not assessed and no ITU staff attends when they arrest. Staff are working as much as they can but they are starting to get sick and are emotionally overwhelmed. Meanwhile, lots of people act like nothing is happening: https://twitter.com/figgyjam/status/1236982564503486465 https://twitter.com/figgyjam/status/1236982564503486465
  - austincheney 7y ago
    That is a serious concern, but is not an indication of panic. I live in the third most populous country in world and there have been extremely few cases reported here, though that number is growing. Even still people here are hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer like there is a zombie apocalypse. There are already memes about black market back alley toilet paper at $10 per single roll.
    - paulsutter 7y ago
      Three weeks ago Italy had no cases at all. Seven weeks ago, China had only 50 cases. Meanwhile the president of the third most populous country is doing his damndest to prevent the number from going up. "Seattle-area nursing home unable to test 65 workers with COVID-19 symptoms" https://news.trust.org/item/20200309234801-s0bah https://news.trust.org/item/20200309234801-s0bah
dot1x 7y ago
Why is this website spammed so much? I don't even know who this person is.
throwaway_Bees 7y ago
I sold honey for a time, at significantly higher prices than the market price, retail price was $1.99/.25 ounce (our wholesale price was a little less than 50% of the retail). To put it in perspective a typical 12oz honey bear retails for $3.50-$4. The secret to our success was coloring it red, and giving it a "vampire theme" at the height of the Vampire show/movie craze and selling it through Hot Topic (a Fortune 500 retailer with our target demographic and we were selling through 800 stores nationwide).
- draw_down 7y ago
  The article is not about selling honey.
jancsika 7y ago
Unfortunately for Rachel's argument, rhetoric exists. That means that while Alice can come along and be less evil than Barry and Mark, Eve can appear to be less evil than all of them and corner the market. Now ask yourself which our society optimizes for: designing and implementing sustainable, ethical business models? Or designing and implementing sophisticated public relations campaigns? Btw-- how much market share does Firefox currently have?
edu 7y ago
Reputation matters, and it's important to cultivate and improve it.
lazyant 7y ago
Products that are commoditized and are the same distinguish themselves with marketing, see vodka for example.
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  They really try to decommoditize themselves to varying degrees of success. People care about Coke vs Pepsi. Very few care about gasoline or heating oil.
scarejunba 7y ago
Pricing is everything when you don't have product differentiation. You will win if you lower your price and the other guy sells himself as the nice guy. It's the most common revealed preference. People do exist who care about these things but it's rare. The ideal situation is you give people the ability to pretend caring but actually continue exploitation.

141 points by weinzierl 7y ago

> Maybe they'll pay their bees better. They'll hire them outright and give them bee benefits instead of having them work as 1099 labor. That'll win a bunch of hearts and minds. "Oh, it's better for the bees, so now we only buy our honey from Willy". I always ask to be 1099 labor, and I'm always told "absolutely not. It'll never happen; completely unacceptable". Where does this delusion come from that W2 status is a good thing that workers want to have and employers want to withhold? Where are these W2-withholding employers?

moron4hire 7y ago
The difficulty in finding 1099 arrangements these days for tech companies is that they often want to monopolize your time, which they can't do in a 1099 arrangement. Basically, back in the late 90s or so, Microsoft tried to use 1099s to avoid giving out benefits (such as unemployment insurance) and got hammered by the Labor Department for it. So now most places either put everyone under W2 or are super strict about the number of hours you can work. It basically comes down to who gets to say when you start and stop working. If the company wants to demand a certain set of hours of the day (not just an aggregate of hours during a work period), then the person doing the work is not a "contractor". Contractors are supposed to be able to make their own hours and find any number of clients they wish to fill their time. If the client doesn't like you doing that, then they are obligated to make you an employee.
- cosmodisk 7y ago
  The mentality of some companies are beyond weird. If I hire a contractor, especially in tech sector, I couldn't care less what hours he does as long as the job is done.If I can't measure what the guy does in x days/month- I'm a tool in here. There are still too many managers out there who think that if a person sits all day staring at the monitor that equates working.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > If the company wants to demand a certain set of hours of the day (not just an aggregate of hours during a work period), then the person doing the work is not a "contractor". Contractors are supposed to be able to make their own hours and find any number of clients they wish to fill their time. This is not true in general; for example, security guards can have contractor status while obviously still being required to show up during their shift and not someone else's shift.
  - culturestate 7y ago
    > security guards can have contractor status while obviously still being required to show up during their shift and not someone else's shift No, the IRS (assuming we're talking about the US) wouldn't allow it - that security guard would either need to be classified as an employee or provide their services to the customer as a corporate entity themselves. The guidelines[1] around this are very straightforward: "Under common-law rules, anyone who performs services for you is your employee if you can control what will be done and how it will be done. This is so even when you give the employee freedom of action. What matters is that you have the right to control the details of how the services are performed." 1. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/independent-contractor-defined https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      > The guidelines around this are very straightforward And yet your quote doesn't even mention scheduling or the concept of time. > the IRS wouldn't allow that - that security guard would either need to be classified as an employee or provide services as a corporation This is not true. Please don't spread falsehoods in public like this. See https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2016/03/my-new-hero-and-how-the-department-of-labor-bought-me-drinks.html https://coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2016/03/my-new-hero-and-h... and the link through, https://www.cato.org/blog/four-more-courts-smack-down-obama-administration-workplace-law https://www.cato.org/blog/four-more-courts-smack-down-obama-... . The fact that a job needs to be performed at a particular time is not sufficient to prevent contractors from performing that job.
dangrossman 7y ago
Mark is Uber and Barry is Lyft. The bees are the drivers. Uber and Lyft do not want to put them on payroll, while the drivers filed a class action suit saying they should be treated as employees not contractors. Swap in #1 and #2 from any "gig economy" market, same story.
seanalltogether 7y ago
> Where does this delusion come from that W2 status is a good thing that workers want to have and employers want to withhold? Where are these W2-withholding employers? The last dev agency I worked for, all designers/developers were 1099 at the start but everyone had to transition to W-2 by like 2009ish. The reason being that Colorado was cracking down hard on companies with 1099 workers. As far as labor board is concerned, if you walk like a duck, quack like a duck, you're a duck.

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willvarfar 7y ago

Perhaps Barry started the rumors? His moat is that he can out-slander every other beekeeper?

motohagiography 7y ago
Precisely. It's a race to the bottom and a purity spiral.

danmur 7y ago

Barry and Mark and whoever else can't make enough honey for everyone. The value proposition is that you can exchange for .

mikekchar 7y ago

A long time ago I worked for Bell Northern Research (which eventually became Nortel, which eventually became insolvent). When I started there they had a retirement savings program where they would sell you BNR stock for half price (though you had to have it in your retirement savings). I said "No thank you" and a lot of people thought I was crazy. At the time the company was pulling in $18 billion a year and was making about a 5% profit (later it was found that the "5% profit" was actually accounting fraud but nobody knew that at the time). From my perspective, I looked at the business and realised that we were selling hardware at a 90% margin, but only eking out a 5% profit. Where was the rest of the money going? Well, obviously to a very inefficient rest of the company that included the software developers (me ;-) ). Later it was discovered that it was also being imbezzled, but we didn't know about it at that time... It occurred to me, though, that the only thing that was stopping a company from eating our lunch was that telecom hardware was a capital intensive industry. So you had BNR, AT&T and Seimens capturing practically the entire market, each being as incompetent as the other, but with very little distinction between them. All you needed was a few billion dollars to shake the industry to the core. And, of course, that happened. It took only a couple of years (less than 5 I think) for Nortel to go from 100K employees to zero (with the executives slurping up the retirement fund to pay for their own "retention bonuses", because what would have happened if the executives bolted as soon as bankruptcy proceedings started??? I mean apart from retirees actually getting their retirement money, obviously...) But it's a funny thing because if I were Barry, I would be selling mead. And I would open up a visitor centre in a "Ye Olde Merry England" vibe where you can sample the mead. And I would start an onsite bakery with Knights in Shining Armour theme where I would test out recipes on my customers. And I would make a joint venture with a factory producing confectionary to try to get into convenience stores. And because I would quickly run out of honey to sell, I would buy up all of Mark's honey and eventually just acquire him so that he's my employee. Then I'd fire him because he's mean to bees. But realistically, I think Barry will just be trying to figure out how to siphon a few extra dollars out of the business and into his pocket because starting up new ventures are risky and hard work.

ainiriand 7y ago
I want to work for you.

jankotek 7y ago

Honeybees are delicate creatures. If bee hive is not treated well, it gets sick, decreases honey production and maybe does not survive winter. Mark in this story would probably went bankrupt in a few years.

kriro 7y ago

That seems like a pretty unrealistic scenario. I guess it's a thought experiment but positioning (and the existence of branding/marketing) alone would indicate to me that Barry and Mark are not going to be exactly the same. Positioning is always going to be at the very least a soft-moat and especially in consumable goods it's going to be a pretty strong moat (think Coke vs. Pepsi).

serioussecurity 7y ago
Uber / Lyft

D_Alex 7y ago

This reads like some kind of allegory, but I really cannot tell for what... But taking it in the somewhat literal spirit: we have a good analogy in the market with free range eggs. Here in Australia, "free range" hens must be kept at no more that 10,000 head/hectare (or 1 sqm of land per hen). This is massively better than battery hens, which are kept at as low as... 0.03 sqm of cage/hen. The animal welfare benefits are huge, battery hens have a truly horrible existence, to the point where I believe that it is immoral to farm them in this way. But some producers are advertising lower stocking densities, some 6 sqm per hen and others even 10 sqm. They are charging a small premium for their eggs, and some people pay it, because they like the idea of animals being treated well. So yes, many people are prepared to pay a bit extra for ethical treatment of animals. Even people (if that where the original post was pointing at).

beloch 7y ago
Given the source, I interpreted it as referring to how companies treat their employees (i.e. worker bees). The story suggests that, all other things being equal, consumers might gravitate towards companies with a reputation for treating their employees well. Mark, Barry, and Willy produce the same product at the same price, so how they treat their employees becomes how they differentiate themselves and win over consumers. The problem is, all things are rarely equal and, if they are, businesses usually find ways of differentiating themselves that consumers care more about than happy employees. When Mark starts losing business to Barry, he's going to cut his prices, spend more on advertising, etc.. Treating his bees poorly may actually help him squeeze more honey out of them at less cost, so Barry might not be able to match him without starting to mistreat his bees a little too. Willy's costs are probably the highest of the three, but maybe he can use clever advertising to portray his product as a luxury item that's somehow better than Barry's or Mark's, even if it's identical. If that fails he'll have to choose between happy bees and not going bankrupt. I'd like to live in a world where a virtuous feedback loop would lead to companies treating their employees better and better, but history says that's not the world we live in. We live in a world that has had to come up with labour unions when spirals of mistreatment and cost-cutting got out of hand. We live in a world where executive pay is going stratospheric while employee benefits are stagnant. Perhaps it would be a better world if people cared more about how companies treat their employees, but I honestly don't see how you get people browsing Amazon to choose the honey that's $2/jar more just because it came from slightly happier bees.

fnord77 7y ago

Uber vs. Lyft?

rachelbythebees 7y ago
Yes, that's definitely what this is about. Rachel recently quit working at Lyft (the title = "No More Pink Mustache"): https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/02/29/poof/ https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/02/29/poof/
- zhdc1 7y ago
  If this is a comparison between Uber and Lyft, I'm not sure I really get it. Platform business models are essentially winner takes all. Lyft's value proposition is that they're number two in a market where anyone who isn't in the top 4-5 has almost no chance of winning. This doesn't mean that they're doing enough to differentiate themselves from Uber, or that they'll ever be able to turn an actual profit, but for the short and medium term game they're more than capable of fending off Uber-copy #27.
icemelt8 7y ago
I thought this was Chrome vs Firefox

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dvfjsdhgfv 7y ago

That's why I take all alternatives to Google and Facebook with a grain of salt. Their UVP is to be less evil than the near-monopolies they try to compete with. But they need to make money somehow! The current "common knowledge" is that if they don't profile people, they can't be efficient. That's very wrong. There are many ways to deliver ads to people that might be interested in them without profiling individuals. But the market is too inert, and people too hooked to FB and Google already.

moron4hire 7y ago

I think a lot of the long tail of open source projects are like this, the small treams and solo-contributors. Or at least that is what they put front-and-center. I know I've been guilty of doing it myself. "Our software is better because it's not made by Evilbook Partners, LTD". The natural, default position is to think everyone else thinks like you do. So if you present a solution to a problem, they should value it the same way you do. "I wrote this because I didn't want to do X". But it seems to turn out that most people don't care about your specific X. My last, big attempt at FOSS didn't start that way. When I first started the project, it was the only such project available. But a household-name corp started their own, competing project a year later and all I was left with was (other than a much more complete implementation) some proselytizing about the open web. But none of it could compete with them funding developers out of pocket--while I scraped together contact jobs--to go out and implement their library for other people's projects, write more blog posts than I have hours in a day, and generally just fill the space with "look at us, we're the only dog in town" fake news. I knew their project was nowhere near as complete or easy to use as mine. But I never put the time into expressing that. Well, for one thing they were playing the "we're all one, big, happy community of niche-industry devs" card, so it was impossible to say anything that could at all be considered negative towards them. But I had so much code to write, and code is a lot easier to me than marketing. It would have taken me becoming an expert in their project, when they had no such burden with regards to mine. I let myself get pushed into taking about my project in terms of theirs. Hell, some people even accused me if "wasting time, reinventing the wheel" (to this day, no phrase pisses me off more). Now, I'm just trying to write software for myself. That's all I was ever really doing. The FOSS stuff had no plan, it was just "here's some code, maybe other people will find it useful". While that is often the ur-myth of FOSS, if it were ever true, is just not how projects grow today.

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samdung 7y ago

You got me at "Grocer News" :)

growt 7y ago

> Maybe they'll pay their bees better. As an aspiring beekeeper: Please no! I can't afford to pay 100.000 Bees! We can talk about an retirement plan though, as they all die working.

Svoka 7y ago
Pretty sure you're already paying them days off with sugar or something similar.
bregma 7y ago
The upside is that all the workers are female so you only have to pay them 70%.

Svoka 7y ago

I don't get it. Is it a metaphor or analogy of some sort? From my experience, analogies usually are a mechanism of manipulation, trying to drag in some arguments which bare facts cannot support.

itronitron 7y ago
The author is making a point, by analogy, that consumers make purchase decisions based on a relative ranking of company behaviors and reputation. This is why PR firms exist. Consider what might happen if 'someone' produced a popular documentary on the psychological trauma that YT or FB moderators endure. (If such a documentary already exists I'm sure it will be posted here)

alixanderwang 7y ago

The longer a business is around, the more opportunities to generate some negative press that has some people label them as evil, which is a label that generally doesn't get removed no matter what comes after. It's another reason why startups can win over customers. In general, startups from inception have a squeaky clean image until they get big enough for journalists/bloggers to shit on -- then repeat.

7777fps 7y ago

The way I read this is that companies who are slightly less evil than others are really the bad ones because someone else could come in and be slightly less than them, and then everyone loses? Except if companies are fighting to treat employees better, then everybody wins because conditions get better.

werber 7y ago

I read so many of my choices in that, lyft over uber, my iPhone over an Android, and on and on

tenant 7y ago

All Mark has to do is reduce his price a little. People will then rationalise their decision to buy Mark's honey by telling themselves that if the price was the same they'd buy Barry's because they care about the bees.

jiofih 7y ago
Exactly! Then they start a race to the bottom, take up debt, and spend on marketing until one goes bust! By then everyone is buying imported synthetic honey which is way cheaper anyway. Heil capitalism.
- nostrebored 7y ago
  ... so you're saying at the end of the day consumers got a better product that's ostensibly valuable and accessible?
  - pjc50 7y ago
    They get a product which is worse, but in very non-obvious ways, and has some sort of negative environmental impact that is hard to identify until years later.
    - xaxsacsdaffbnk 7y ago
      They get what they pay for. And here in my capitalist country, "good" honey seems to be selling just fine.
      - wayoutthere 7y ago
        The biggest problem with modern capitalism is that you don't know if something is "good" before you buy it. The information asymmetry / obfuscation ensures that.
        xaxsacsdaffbnk 7y ago

itronitron 7y ago

KeyValues stock is rising.

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arnaudsm 7y ago

Thanks to this effect, small food companies are growing fast since the 2000s. "Big Food" is fighting back by doing local-washing: silently buy small companies, industrialize them, then pretend to be local and responsible. Tech has exactly the same problem.

Nasrudith 7y ago
Well aren't they still local then? It doesn't teleport the facilities thousands of miles away.

dougweltman 7y ago

The proposition that ethical sourcing is the differentiator in an otherwise undifferentiated market seems incoherent. If Barry is able to communicate to the market that his honey operation is more ethical, then he can communicate other things to the market as well, irrespective of whether they have any substance or basis in product. Lots of brands of water out there, many different shapes and sizes of bottles. Barry's honey is differentiated, just not in terms of product. Mark can continue treating his bees badly, or he can try to discredit Barry, or he can try to differentiate his product in some way (planting health-giving plants whose pollen they can deposit into their honey). The post imagines only one assumption being relaxed: that of ethical sourcing and the ability to communicate that fact. But in relaxing those assumptions, it is natural to relax others: the power of marketing being foremost. This is a complex system and you cannot change a single variable, or imagine that Mark simply takes Barry's moralistic grandstanding lying down.

lovemenot 7y ago
Completely agree with you on supply-side. But Barry need not be alone in his market communication. It is reasonable to suppose that demand-side is also a complex, dynamic system which may respond to diverse communications, including such as in the original post.

perlgeek 7y ago

You don't need a unique value proposition to sell honey. If you sell honey, usually your goal isn't to monopolize the whole honey market. You just sell honey. You might be nearer to some customers. You might be a bit friendlier, or have slightly better marketing. Or people just buy from you because they are used to it. Not every market is a winner-takes-all, and that's very good. This translates to software as well. There are many markets that don't have one monopolist, and space for many players.

hrktb 7y ago
> you might be nearer to some customers > have slightly better marketing These two parts are not trivial, and would justify the success of one over the other. Being near customers for a bee keeper requires a decent effort, in particular if the production itself is done near the selling shop. You just don't move your hive in a busy street corner like you'd open a Starbucks. Marketing honey is also the main premise of this piece: what value proposition do you push forward. It will be a world of difference between someone pushing for 'local honey' on TV and someone else pushing for a healthy lifetstyle and building a customer community around that. Overall I feel that the person writing this piece doesn't really like honey much, but I get that it was just some analogy. I wish she took a field she is more interested in.

Frost1x 7y ago

This is crazy... but if you'll entertain the idea for a moment: not everyone who operates a business or sells product/services do it out of profit driven motives. Sometimes, people enjoy the lifestyle of their work and provide a product/service that people want/need/will love pay for. Their business may not be unique, they may not offer optimal prices. Sure, these folks can very likely be undercut because it's unlikely that by these goals alone they're running an optimal process to reduce costs or have the capital to scale things up to points they can attain cost saving advantages. This means their value proposition would be fairly weak. That's fine. People still want honey and maybe they like Mark or Barry or whomever and would rather pay a little bit extra to make sure their local bee keeper is able eat and continue to contribute to their community. One unique value proposition does come to mind however for many of these local artisan style businesses: these people are less likely to abandon small communities. Pure businesses focused on profit motives alone will leave when the situation become unprofitable. People like Mike and Barry are more likely to stay as long as their lifestyle can be maintained. They may even have children who want to continue the family business as is (or not). There are plenty of examples where Walmart, for example, saw opportunities in small rural communities, swept in, undercut the competition and then for one reason or another found it would be best to close the store leaving a vacuum of needs to be met: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/when-wal-mart-leaves-small-towns-behind https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/when-wal-mart-leaves-small... Sometimes the local businesses can rebound but often those local vendors aren't interested in being burned twice. Life is not always about offering the best value proposition. Constantly worrying about optimization in every aspect of life will make you pretty miserable (at least from my experience). At some point you have to choose happy over optimal and understand that's a respectable goal.

learnstats2 7y ago
> not everyone who operates a business or sells product/services do it out of profit driven motives. I don't believe that's the case. If you have almost any other motive, running a business is generally not the best way to reach that goal. I provide a service which I am good at and enjoy, and would be prepared to provide to friends for free. Like almost everyone does, in fact. I run my service as a business so that I can keep a roof over my head: that's ultimately a profit motive.

dannyw 7y ago

Bees are users. Honey is data.

zaat 7y ago

What is the unique value proposition of anything? If Barry sells higher quality honey, what keeps someone else from coming in and sell even better quality honey, and for half the price? Oh, you say that it isn't simple to make good quality honey cheaply? Well all the same, it ain't easy to be profitable while providing all your bees with top notch health care too.

sp332 7y ago
Yeah but the article is just about being less terrible. Like if an employer is really going out of their way to be abusive. That's when a competitor can get an advantage just by... doing nothing.
sigmaprimus 7y ago
I think thats the point of the article, UVP or unique sales proposition is how a company can market their identical product better than their competition. The article suggests that by simply treating bees better, or infact less bad would result in a marketable difference translating to better honey sales. The reality is a successful honey company would employ several UVPs to promote their product and protect their market share. Perfume companies have done this for years, same with beverage companies. Probably the closest analogy would be ethical investment brokers and mutual fund groups who claim that they only put your money into "good" companies. Sure your returns might not be as high but atleast you can sleep well at night knowing your not supporting "evil" companies. One last point, honey is a very unique farm product, other than the initial startup cost and minimal labour there are no other inputs required. Almost every other livestock requires feed, medicine, intensive management etc... Bees are very independent, require very little management and produce an easy to market long lasting cash crop. (Unlike free range chickens, although chickens and bees live well together)
- bregma 7y ago
  > One last point, honey is a very unique farm product, other than the initial startup cost and minimal labour there are no other inputs required. Almost every other livestock requires feed, medicine, intensive management etc... Ah, the naivete of someone who does not keep bees.

Jedd 7y ago

Aha, hermeneutics. The literal answer is probably found in the law of comparative advantage -- both Barry and Mark should do what they're best at doing. (Arguably this law is one of the handful of non-obvious insights from the science <sic> of economics.) A lot of markets are extremely price sensitive, but, OTOH, there seems to be a growing ratio of informed consumers that are not racing to the bottom, but instead acknowledge that a) almost every action has an ethical component that can / should be factored in, and b) how you spend your money has a greater impact than how you cast your 3-5 yearly vote.

bluedino 7y ago

I was looking forward to a good read about why organic honey is $14.99 for a small jar.

xaxsacsdaffbnk 7y ago

Yes, it is a good thing that competition also operates on "being good". You can't be arbitrarily "good" to your employees, though. You have to improve your business to be able to afford to be better to your employees. That's as it should be.

zajio1am 7y ago

What would Mark do? When Barry offers higher 'ethical value' by treating bees better, then Mark would need to find some different ethical axis on which he excels above Barry (say, has lower CO_2 emissions per jar of honey) and advertise that. Then customers are splitted based on which ethical axis is more important to them and internalized that decision. Now both Barry and Mark can increase their profit margin as customers would not switch to the other 'evil one'.

mwcampbell 7y ago

This is obviously about Uber and Lyft. So I want to drop the analogy and talk about the real thing. I live in Bellevue, WA. I would gladly pay 1.5x the normal rate for Uber in this area to get my rides from a company that (a) is sustainably profitable (b) treats its drivers ethically, e.g. hiring them as real employees, and (c) otherwise has the same rider experience as Uber and Lyft, e.g. booking through an app, average ETA under 10 minutes, automatic payment. Should I expect to pay more? If so, how much more? 2x? 5x? 10x?

blowski 7y ago
I don't know if it's "obviously" about Uber and Lyft, rather than any rivalry in which one side's value proposition includes a huge element of "we're not the other side". Could be about Google vs DuckDuckGo, WhatsApp vs Telegram, iOS vs Android, or even Trump vs Biden.
- jdm2212 7y ago
  The author works (worked?) at Lyft.
draw_down 7y ago
Read TFA to find out!
kaikai 7y ago
Many taxi companies now have apps, which offer basically that. Similar cost to Uber/Lyft, entirely different model for their workers.
SamuelAdams 7y ago
It could also be about the video game industry. AAA studios are known for requiring 80+ hour weeks during crunch time, and there has been chatter among gamers to avoid games these studios produce until workers receive better / fairer working conditions. Of course gamers bought the games anyways, because the loud group who cares about how a game was developed is a small set of the overall audience of that game.

Syzygies 7y ago

I buy honey from http://thehoneyladies.com/biography/ http://thehoneyladies.com/biography/ because they save bees. (Yes, I understand this was allegory, but I took it literally.)

itronitron 7y ago
nice gallery on their website, I feel sorry for the construction workers that discovered some of those nests

austincheney 7y ago

The irrelevant value proposition described in the blog reminds me of the panic around this current virus and the hostility when people compare it to the flu even if that comparison is limited to the most boring of facts published by the WHO. People frequently need to exercise a value proposition in defiance of objectivity. Dr Seuss even wrote a cartoon about using that as a tool to manipulate people: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PdLPe7XjdKc https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PdLPe7XjdKc

paulsutter 7y ago
You might want to read up on what it's like in Italy right now. The issue is not the death rate, the hospitalization rate quickly overloads the healthcare system: https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/1237142891077697538 https://twitter.com/jasonvanschoor/status/123714289107769753... "We’ve stopped all routine, all ORs have been converted to ITUs and they are now diverting or not treating all other emergencies like trauma or strokes. There are hundreds of pts with severe resp failure and many of them do not have access to anything above a reservoir mask. "Patients above 65 or younger with comorbidities are not even assessed by ITU, I am not saying not tubed, I’m saying not assessed and no ITU staff attends when they arrest. Staff are working as much as they can but they are starting to get sick and are emotionally overwhelmed. Meanwhile, lots of people act like nothing is happening: https://twitter.com/figgyjam/status/1236982564503486465 https://twitter.com/figgyjam/status/1236982564503486465
- austincheney 7y ago
  That is a serious concern, but is not an indication of panic. I live in the third most populous country in world and there have been extremely few cases reported here, though that number is growing. Even still people here are hoarding toilet paper and hand sanitizer like there is a zombie apocalypse. There are already memes about black market back alley toilet paper at $10 per single roll.
  - paulsutter 7y ago
    Three weeks ago Italy had no cases at all. Seven weeks ago, China had only 50 cases. Meanwhile the president of the third most populous country is doing his damndest to prevent the number from going up. "Seattle-area nursing home unable to test 65 workers with COVID-19 symptoms" https://news.trust.org/item/20200309234801-s0bah https://news.trust.org/item/20200309234801-s0bah

dot1x 7y ago

Why is this website spammed so much? I don't even know who this person is.

throwaway_Bees 7y ago

I sold honey for a time, at significantly higher prices than the market price, retail price was $1.99/.25 ounce (our wholesale price was a little less than 50% of the retail). To put it in perspective a typical 12oz honey bear retails for $3.50-$4. The secret to our success was coloring it red, and giving it a "vampire theme" at the height of the Vampire show/movie craze and selling it through Hot Topic (a Fortune 500 retailer with our target demographic and we were selling through 800 stores nationwide).

draw_down 7y ago
The article is not about selling honey.

jancsika 7y ago

Unfortunately for Rachel's argument, rhetoric exists. That means that while Alice can come along and be less evil than Barry and Mark, Eve can appear to be less evil than all of them and corner the market. Now ask yourself which our society optimizes for: designing and implementing sustainable, ethical business models? Or designing and implementing sophisticated public relations campaigns? Btw-- how much market share does Firefox currently have?

edu 7y ago

Reputation matters, and it's important to cultivate and improve it.

lazyant 7y ago

Products that are commoditized and are the same distinguish themselves with marketing, see vodka for example.

Nasrudith 7y ago
They really try to decommoditize themselves to varying degrees of success. People care about Coke vs Pepsi. Very few care about gasoline or heating oil.

scarejunba 7y ago

Pricing is everything when you don't have product differentiation. You will win if you lower your price and the other guy sells himself as the nice guy. It's the most common revealed preference. People do exist who care about these things but it's rare. The ideal situation is you give people the ability to pretend caring but actually continue exploitation.