Let's say before this large coffee with investment money came in, there was 25 individual coffee shops in the city. Let's call them Starbucks. Then this company

Let's say before this large coffee with investment money came in, there was 25 individual coffee shops in the city. Let's call them Starbucks. Then this company comes in with economies of scale and is able to sell coffee for 10% cheaper. Their product is more consistent. But there are individual coffee shops that produce higher quality coffee, and others who produce lower quality coffee, and both are more expensive. If this is your first time in the city, and you don't have any information from friends about the quality of random shops, your going to pick Starbucks. This is the value of a brand. And while they are still competing, everything is all good. But 5 years later once all of those individual coffee shops have gone out of business, you're left with just Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. And they don't compete on price. Quality drops. Each of those 25 shops were doing their own creative thing. They were trying out all sorts of innovations. Some worked, others didn't. Now we have no innovation. The big shops are conservative and move at glacial pace. As a worker you were helping drive those innovations. You were testing stuff out. Now working at BigCo, you follow orders. You do what the machine tells you to do. If you're working for Uber, you pick people up, follow the route, and drop people off. --- Here's this question asked on quora: How much does soda cost?[0] This is in no way an authoritative source, but it's a neutral third-party that can at least end the slander that you are operating against me. The answer they give is that it's fair to say that basically the water and sugar is free, cost is right around $0.10, and after shipping it's about a quarter. So was I wrong by 250%? No, because they don't only offer cans of soda. Most of the soda they sell is at restaurants and all they need to ship is the dry stuff. I figure the $0.10 average is right on the money. [0]: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-manufacture-355-ml-12-fl-ounces-of-Coca-Cola-Do-we-pay-much-more-than-that-What-accounts-for-the-difference-How-do-they-get-so-many-people-to-pay-so-much-more https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-manufacture-3...