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Articles like these make me appreciate my business degree, because this list is the basics of any business. 30% COGS, high shipping costs, outsourced manufactur
by soared 4y ago
Articles like these make me appreciate my business degree, because this list is the basics of any business. 30% COGS, high shipping costs, outsourced manufacturing, big box focusing on low end market, etc is all very normal for almost any industry.
- leephillips 4y agoI don’t have a business degree, but every point in the post was totally as expected...nothing particular to audio in there.
- bloodyplonker22 4y agoI don't mean to be rude, but you don't need a business degree to understand the very basic things that you mentioned. I am fairly sure that most people using Hacker News understand those simple concepts in business.
- wmf 4y agoI don't know; I've seen so many people (including my younger self) who have completely wrong intuitions about business. This often manifests as FUD and hating that can be hard to dispel.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bo1024 4y agoI don’t have a business degree and yeah, I think I comprehend what was written, but before reading it I wouldn’t have guessed at much of it, a lot of my intuition or assumptions would have been wrong. More generally, sure, you never “need” an X degree to understand X, but most people won’t have spent the time learning X on their own unless they have an X degree.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tdeck 4y agoI think OP is saying that they're gaining a new appreciation for the fundamentals they learned which aren't necessarily common knowledge. Not that those fundamentals are so sophisticated that you need a degree to grasp them.
- calvinmorrison 4y agoIf you are in IT, and you're not a fantastic engineer. Level up your business skills. ERP administrators are an untapped source of business knowledge, because they map all the crap business is up to and are forced to learn about all the weird metrics, acronyms, reports, and so forth a business uses to survive.
- crims0n 4y ago30% COGS surprised me… I always estimated it would have been around 50%. Learned something new.
- edrxty 4y agoYou can do better if you're selling the stuff yourself, but that follows a bathtub curve with totally bespoke on one end and Apple on the other. It seems it becomes a struggle to keep up sales unless you're on Amazon and stacked on big box retailer shelves.
- lmm 4y agoI already knew the rule of thumb that a retail store needs 50% markup, so 30% seems reasonable in that context (indeed I'd've guessed 25%).
- fruit2020 4y agoSo when I buy an Oled tv, does the store procure it for half the price from the distributor? Sounds like a huge margin. How about from an ecommerce store, which a lot of times have slightly less but close prices to regular stores, can the distributor force them to keep prices up not to upset the other resellers?
- junofan 4y agoIt’s a sheet of plastic glued to another piece of plastic. Yes.
- wmf 4y agoSo when I buy an OLED TV, does the store procure it for half the price from the distributor? Generally yes. can the distributor force them to keep prices up not to upset the other resellers? Retailers upsetting other retailers is called channel conflict and is often solved with minimum advertised price policies. High-end companies like Apple and Sony often have this policy which is why you see the same price everywhere.
- yewenjie 4y agoIs there some online course I can take to learn the crux of a business degree?
- MarcelOlsz 4y agoI'm not joking when I say this, I have no idea how business works. I get it in theory, hell I even sold one. But I still don't know. One of my space-cadet day dreams is trying to figure out just what someone could possibly learn in business school and I can't come up with anything.
- Spooky23 4y agoMostly how to make certain types of spreadsheets, some finance stuff and how to talk business crap with other business people. It’s not rocket science.
- organsnyder 4y agoA good business school teaches organizational dynamics, change management, and leadership skills. Not rocket science, but potentially just as hard.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tradewinds 4y agoAccounting (for example the poster in the link states marketing does not make up COGS, which to someone who studied accounting is obvious). Simple economics (poster reveals "secret" that Price*Quantity can equal higher total revenue when price/quantity change disproportionately). Consumer behaviour (Dr. Dre can lead people to believe crap from pile A is better than crap from pile B). This is apparent insider-knowledge from someone who spent several years in industry - or you can go to school for the first 1.5 years of a business undergrad program and learn it that way across many more industries. In the final years of business school once you've chosen a specialization, you may learn advanced corporate finance (stocks, bonds, weighted cost of capital, different types of break-even measurement like economic break-even vs accounting break-even). Or you may specialize in accounting, operations, marketing, yada yada. Then an MBA is apparently much of what is taught in a good business undergrad but perhaps faster-paced and you get a shit ton of networking value.
- tradewinds 4y agoExactly. I too majored in business and I read through to the end waiting to see where the "secrets" were. This is super, super basic stuff that has more to do with really simple microeconomics driving firms' investment decisions. Most frivolous consumer-oriented sectors of the economy are all the same.
- caned 4y agoNormal don't make it right!!