5 ms·

Why wouldn't your friend just open up a practice and compete with this dysfunctional company?

by epups 3y ago

quickthrowman 3y ago
Some vets just want to practice veterinary medicine instead of running a business. Start to finish, a vet clinic buildout is going to run you $1M+, and any lender is going to want a personal guarantee that uses your home and other personal assets as collateral if they’re lending to a new business owner. You could certainly find investors, but then you’ll have people wanting an ROI. I could come up with more reasons, but those two are probably the main ones. My grandfather opened and ran two veterinary clinics in the 1970s. He sold both of them in the 1980s, one of them is still around. The other one closed after the buyer, another veterinarian, killed himself after the building and land were eminent domained for a freeway expansion and he felt he wasn’t paid enough for the land by the government.
singleshot_ 3y ago
Maybe because now that the retail vet is destroyed and rich people need vets who are not pathologically inconvenient and terrible, there is a brisk market for retained private vets. This is a trend I’ve noticed that goes along with “enshittification” wherein the normal thing (let’s take grocery stores as an example) become either so downmarket-oriented (e.g., Dollar General) or aggravating (e.g., self-checkout lanes, poor inventory management, objectionable customer service) that they abandon the middle market and become intolerable. At that point the upper part of the market diverges, and something like personal shoppers becomes the norm for anyone who can afford it. On one hand, people in the middle class get squeezed by salary, and on the other hand they get squeezed because they hate Dollar General and they can’t afford a butler to shop for them. Real nice system we have here.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    Nuanced and relevant as ever.
  - dv_dt 3y ago
    After the n-th supermarket merger in my small town making every major supermarket in town a subsidiary of Albertsons, the inventory management was so bad that empty shelves started and continue to be an occurrence. Worse, the fresh produce declined in both quality and selection. But hey, the Kroger-Albertsons merger is before us... I hope the antitrust analysis blocks it, but really it's already too late.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      I've lived in small towns. Part of being in a small town is there isn't a smorgasbord of businesses in the same business and competing with each other. We'd wait until we had a long enough list to make the drive worthwhile, and then drive to the Big City to take care of the list.
      - dv_dt 3y ago
        Oh the town is big enough that there are 4-5 supermarket sites. It’s just that it’s vons, pavilions, Albertsons, etc all owned by the same parent company which has made the choice for all of us that we don’t need to actually fill shelves with items or maintain a quality of product. In that respect, late stage Capitalism looks a lot like poorly formed Communism where a small cabal of people make wide impact decisions for others with no feedback.
        WalterBright 3y ago
        If they were not serving their customers, a competitor will emerge.
- evancox100 3y ago
  Dollar General didn’t move down market, they moved up. Still plenty of regular grocery stores around, at least here. And who abandons the middle part of the market? The providers? The customers? Not really making sense here but I get it if you’re just venting or whatever.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    I didn't mean that dollar stores had moved down market; I meant that dollar stores moved in, split the low end of the market out of the old "regular grocery store" and now the medium grocery buyer is left with the choice of dollar store groceries or some kind of grocery delivery service/meal kit/personal chef. If this doesn't make sense, maybe it's a metaphor. Does it seem like the normal way of doing things from 20 years ago has now been replaced with an absolute garbage version, and a version you can't afford?
    - evancox100 3y ago
      No, it does not feel like that to me as far as grocery stores are concerned. (My experience is in large Texas cities.) Do you not just have some store like Tom Thumb, Randall’s, Albertsons, Krogers, Sprouts, or H‑E‑B near you? I know there are places that don’t have good access to regular grocery stores, wondering if that’s the case for you or for some reason you see these as either too junky or too high end? For sure there are more self checkout lanes, but it’s usually not too hard to find a regular staffed lane if that’s what you want.
    - coderenegade 3y ago
      It makes sense to me, and it's a phenomenon I've noticed myself. Now that I think about it, though, I can't come up with any good examples off the top of my head where the middle of the market has truly been abandoned. In tech, Apple comfortably occupies the premium end of the market, and other companies tried to move in (think Microsoft with the Surface) but with fairly limited success. With cars, the move has been to bigger, more luxurious vehicles, but you still have lower end models at various levels of trim. I have noticed it with, say, dentists, where sole traders and small businesses have essentially been replaced by franchises. Same for chemists. To me the driving factor is that not everyone can compete on price, and competing for the luxury segment of the market is a fairly obvious alternative strategy. It also goes hand-in-hand with other factors like sustainability, where it might be impossible to make your product cheaply because you source local or recycled materials, or you make a product that is designed to last longer, so your customers don't return to buy your product as frequently. I'd say the last 7-8 years I've noticed a move to luxury products in most markets just as a general trend. I call it the affordable luxury phenomenon. But I think a lot of it has been driven by cheap credit, and luxury goods makers reaching down into the middle market (the aspirational market) as much as the middle market being abandoned.
- manfre 3y ago
  > aggravating (e.g., self-checkout lanes... self-checkout lanes are not viewed as a bad thing by many. Given the option of a self checkout or staffed checked, I'd choose self checkout. The negative aspect of self-checkout is that it's usually paired with the store being understaffed, instead of redirecting the freed up staff to other roles.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    Where am I supposed to put all the groceries? They have to stay on the scale, but the scale is very small.
    - bavell 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - inconceivable 3y ago
      they make these things called bags. but hey stranger, i appreciate you and everyone like you - i can't remember the last time i waited in a checkout line because i'm in and out of self checkout in like 2 minutes even at peak hours. it's amazing. i've also noticed that even the parking lot is less crowded at stores with self checkout. i'm sure someone has simulated this extensively because i can see it with my own eyes. yet another job where i can, in fact, actually do it better myself. i'm just as fast on the self checkout machines as the cashiers are on their point of sale systems. the buffered queue also helps tremendously, instead of the line lottery of checkout lines. again - simulated and optimized. the other people that do self checkout are also basically young-ish, single/alone, and would rather be anywhere than the fucking grocery store checkout line. separating people who are interested in getting the fuck out of there with food from the people who are slow, clumsy, and deliberately take a long time to make sure all their tiny little nitpicks are addressed by a captive employee audience is the best thing to happen to groceries in the 30+ years i've been wasting my life 15 minutes at a time at stores.
      - jwestbury 3y ago
        > they make these things called bags I think the point here is that if you're the sort of person who does a weekly shop for a family, you can't possibly fit all of your bags on the scale, even at the largest self-checkout kiosks. FWIW, I think your self-checkout experience is probably uncommon. I find that the barcode scanners at self-checkout machines are often poorly-calibrated, dirty, or just generally a pain in the ass. I say this as someone who spent five years doing tech support on point-of-sale equipment, where my job was quite literally to help people use their finicky barcode scanners.
failuser 3y ago
This is not a stupid question. I would only guess that start up capital is not available and the market is not big enough for another practice. And all that before considering licensing. Most professions have a gulf between the wealth of business owners and workers. You can’t start a business working hand to mouth.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  How to start a business without any money: https://www.amazon.com/How-start-business-statistical-bankruptcy/dp/B096TJJQX2 https://www.amazon.com/How-start-business-statistical-bankru...
  - failuser 3y ago
    Get an advance from a publisher to write a book on how to start a business without any money?
JohnFen 3y ago
Starting a business requires a certain sort of personality and interest. Most people don't fit that mold, and most of those people are fully aware of that.
petsfed 3y ago
And take on all the overhead of running a company, when they already have a maybe 1:1 ratio of patient contact hours to unbillable admin? And anyway, even the doctors of veterinary work aren't rolling in money. Private practices sell to investors because they have the mountains of cash that the sole proprietor does not. Its just the devils bargain people strike all the time.
iancmceachern 3y ago
Money. It takes hundreds of thousands to do so, you gotta borrow that. Then it takes 10 or 20 years to pay that back. Then to get your retirement paid for you sell it to a private equity company.
- gtop3 3y ago
  Then the private equity fires your former employees. They borrow money to create their own clinic. They sell in their 60s to a private equity company.
anigbrowl 3y ago
Probably because they don't want to get steamrolled by a much wealthier competitor's marketing/lobbying machine, given all the permits and certifications needed. Franchises are hard to compete with in consumer markets. I used to have a great relationship with a vet who did house calls, but most of her clients were horse owners, which is a very different market than the typical household pet demographic. I doubt she could have got by without that specialty.

Why wouldn't your friend just open up a practice and compete with this dysfunctional company?

by epups 3y ago

Why wouldn't your friend just open up a practice and compete with this dysfunctional company?

Some vets just want to practice veterinary medicine instead of running a business. Start to finish, a vet clinic buildout is going to run you $1M+, and any lender is going to want a personal guarantee that uses your home and other personal assets as collateral if they’re lending to a new business owner. You could certainly find investors, but then you’ll have people wanting an ROI. I could come up with more reasons, but those two are probably the main ones. My grandfather opened and ran two veterinary clinics in the 1970s. He sold both of them in the 1980s, one of them is still around. The other one closed after the buyer, another veterinarian, killed himself after the building and land were eminent domained for a freeway expansion and he felt he wasn’t paid enough for the land by the government.

singleshot_ 3y ago

Maybe because now that the retail vet is destroyed and rich people need vets who are not pathologically inconvenient and terrible, there is a brisk market for retained private vets. This is a trend I’ve noticed that goes along with “enshittification” wherein the normal thing (let’s take grocery stores as an example) become either so downmarket-oriented (e.g., Dollar General) or aggravating (e.g., self-checkout lanes, poor inventory management, objectionable customer service) that they abandon the middle market and become intolerable. At that point the upper part of the market diverges, and something like personal shoppers becomes the norm for anyone who can afford it. On one hand, people in the middle class get squeezed by salary, and on the other hand they get squeezed because they hate Dollar General and they can’t afford a butler to shop for them. Real nice system we have here.

WalterBright 3y ago
[flagged]
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  Nuanced and relevant as ever.
- dv_dt 3y ago
  After the n-th supermarket merger in my small town making every major supermarket in town a subsidiary of Albertsons, the inventory management was so bad that empty shelves started and continue to be an occurrence. Worse, the fresh produce declined in both quality and selection. But hey, the Kroger-Albertsons merger is before us... I hope the antitrust analysis blocks it, but really it's already too late.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I've lived in small towns. Part of being in a small town is there isn't a smorgasbord of businesses in the same business and competing with each other. We'd wait until we had a long enough list to make the drive worthwhile, and then drive to the Big City to take care of the list.
    - dv_dt 3y ago
      Oh the town is big enough that there are 4-5 supermarket sites. It’s just that it’s vons, pavilions, Albertsons, etc all owned by the same parent company which has made the choice for all of us that we don’t need to actually fill shelves with items or maintain a quality of product. In that respect, late stage Capitalism looks a lot like poorly formed Communism where a small cabal of people make wide impact decisions for others with no feedback.
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        If they were not serving their customers, a competitor will emerge.
evancox100 3y ago
Dollar General didn’t move down market, they moved up. Still plenty of regular grocery stores around, at least here. And who abandons the middle part of the market? The providers? The customers? Not really making sense here but I get it if you’re just venting or whatever.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  I didn't mean that dollar stores had moved down market; I meant that dollar stores moved in, split the low end of the market out of the old "regular grocery store" and now the medium grocery buyer is left with the choice of dollar store groceries or some kind of grocery delivery service/meal kit/personal chef. If this doesn't make sense, maybe it's a metaphor. Does it seem like the normal way of doing things from 20 years ago has now been replaced with an absolute garbage version, and a version you can't afford?
  - evancox100 3y ago
    No, it does not feel like that to me as far as grocery stores are concerned. (My experience is in large Texas cities.) Do you not just have some store like Tom Thumb, Randall’s, Albertsons, Krogers, Sprouts, or H‑E‑B near you? I know there are places that don’t have good access to regular grocery stores, wondering if that’s the case for you or for some reason you see these as either too junky or too high end? For sure there are more self checkout lanes, but it’s usually not too hard to find a regular staffed lane if that’s what you want.
  - coderenegade 3y ago
    It makes sense to me, and it's a phenomenon I've noticed myself. Now that I think about it, though, I can't come up with any good examples off the top of my head where the middle of the market has truly been abandoned. In tech, Apple comfortably occupies the premium end of the market, and other companies tried to move in (think Microsoft with the Surface) but with fairly limited success. With cars, the move has been to bigger, more luxurious vehicles, but you still have lower end models at various levels of trim. I have noticed it with, say, dentists, where sole traders and small businesses have essentially been replaced by franchises. Same for chemists. To me the driving factor is that not everyone can compete on price, and competing for the luxury segment of the market is a fairly obvious alternative strategy. It also goes hand-in-hand with other factors like sustainability, where it might be impossible to make your product cheaply because you source local or recycled materials, or you make a product that is designed to last longer, so your customers don't return to buy your product as frequently. I'd say the last 7-8 years I've noticed a move to luxury products in most markets just as a general trend. I call it the affordable luxury phenomenon. But I think a lot of it has been driven by cheap credit, and luxury goods makers reaching down into the middle market (the aspirational market) as much as the middle market being abandoned.
manfre 3y ago
> aggravating (e.g., self-checkout lanes... self-checkout lanes are not viewed as a bad thing by many. Given the option of a self checkout or staffed checked, I'd choose self checkout. The negative aspect of self-checkout is that it's usually paired with the store being understaffed, instead of redirecting the freed up staff to other roles.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  Where am I supposed to put all the groceries? They have to stay on the scale, but the scale is very small.
  - bavell 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - inconceivable 3y ago
    they make these things called bags. but hey stranger, i appreciate you and everyone like you - i can't remember the last time i waited in a checkout line because i'm in and out of self checkout in like 2 minutes even at peak hours. it's amazing. i've also noticed that even the parking lot is less crowded at stores with self checkout. i'm sure someone has simulated this extensively because i can see it with my own eyes. yet another job where i can, in fact, actually do it better myself. i'm just as fast on the self checkout machines as the cashiers are on their point of sale systems. the buffered queue also helps tremendously, instead of the line lottery of checkout lines. again - simulated and optimized. the other people that do self checkout are also basically young-ish, single/alone, and would rather be anywhere than the fucking grocery store checkout line. separating people who are interested in getting the fuck out of there with food from the people who are slow, clumsy, and deliberately take a long time to make sure all their tiny little nitpicks are addressed by a captive employee audience is the best thing to happen to groceries in the 30+ years i've been wasting my life 15 minutes at a time at stores.
    - jwestbury 3y ago
      > they make these things called bags I think the point here is that if you're the sort of person who does a weekly shop for a family, you can't possibly fit all of your bags on the scale, even at the largest self-checkout kiosks. FWIW, I think your self-checkout experience is probably uncommon. I find that the barcode scanners at self-checkout machines are often poorly-calibrated, dirty, or just generally a pain in the ass. I say this as someone who spent five years doing tech support on point-of-sale equipment, where my job was quite literally to help people use their finicky barcode scanners.

failuser 3y ago

This is not a stupid question. I would only guess that start up capital is not available and the market is not big enough for another practice. And all that before considering licensing. Most professions have a gulf between the wealth of business owners and workers. You can’t start a business working hand to mouth.

WalterBright 3y ago
How to start a business without any money: https://www.amazon.com/How-start-business-statistical-bankruptcy/dp/B096TJJQX2 https://www.amazon.com/How-start-business-statistical-bankru...
- failuser 3y ago
  Get an advance from a publisher to write a book on how to start a business without any money?

JohnFen 3y ago

Starting a business requires a certain sort of personality and interest. Most people don't fit that mold, and most of those people are fully aware of that.

petsfed 3y ago

And take on all the overhead of running a company, when they already have a maybe 1:1 ratio of patient contact hours to unbillable admin? And anyway, even the doctors of veterinary work aren't rolling in money. Private practices sell to investors because they have the mountains of cash that the sole proprietor does not. Its just the devils bargain people strike all the time.

iancmceachern 3y ago

Money. It takes hundreds of thousands to do so, you gotta borrow that. Then it takes 10 or 20 years to pay that back. Then to get your retirement paid for you sell it to a private equity company.

gtop3 3y ago
Then the private equity fires your former employees. They borrow money to create their own clinic. They sell in their 60s to a private equity company.

anigbrowl 3y ago

Probably because they don't want to get steamrolled by a much wealthier competitor's marketing/lobbying machine, given all the permits and certifications needed. Franchises are hard to compete with in consumer markets. I used to have a great relationship with a vet who did house calls, but most of her clients were horse owners, which is a very different market than the typical household pet demographic. I doubt she could have got by without that specialty.