4 ms·

> Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destruc

> Ultimately it's driven by customer behavior. If people went to restaurants instead of expecting to be served hot food in their living room, this whole destructive business model wouldn't even exist or would be small enough as to not be negatively impactful. No, you've got that backward. Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital. Advertising is a pretty clear example but it's not the limit. I mean, how many people were ordering DoorDash before DoorDash existed? I'm not being entirely facetious - it's impossible for customers to behave in a way that's not allowed by the market. That you are resistant to these tides is not evidence against, it's just accounted for. You're not the target audience. Nor am I. But neither of us has ever made a decision in a vacuum; we choose our purchases from what's available, according to the information we're exposed to.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital Source? The best argument against this is how elastic demand was when ZIRP ended. Customers responded to an underpriced product. When the price was raised to a profit-clearing level, it no longer cleared most of the market.
- digging 2y ago
  I don't understand your argument. It sounds like customers were reacting to their environment more than driving change.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > sounds like customers were reacting to their environment more than driving change It sounds like customers had agency. Tides of capital gave them more or fewer options, and they chose them at their discretion when the terms were advantageous. When they weren't, ever or any longer, they didn't.
    - digging 2y ago
      ...In other words, because DoorDash is convenient and advantageous for customers, they choose to get food delivered instead of go to the restaurant. And admonishing people for choosing the advantageous option is useless, at best. Does that not follow?
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        You argued "customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital." That's attributing cause and effect. The tides of capital didn't cause the customer behaviour, it enabled existing behaviour to scale. Capital driving behaviour describes diamonds, not DoorDash.
        digging 2y ago
        I'm really confused by your reply, and it doesn't answer the question I posed, so maybe that's that.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
There is no doubt that advertising has a huge impact on customer behavior. But that doesn't mean that consumers are incapable of making choices that go against the grain of the market. It does take a conscious effort, and it's true that most consumers just don't care or can't be bothered with it, or are crushed by too many other things in our modern society to have the bandwidth to even consider their choices.
- digging 2y ago
  Everything you're saying is exactly in accord with what I posted. Individuals always have choice, but when we're looking at an entire population and seeing that large amounts of people are making a choice that we think is "bad", saying, "Well people just need to stop making bad choices. People are stupid. I make good choices." is ludicrous. Let's assume that the answer really is to ensure individual choices are changed. Who's going to go house to house and educate everyone about why the choice to use DoorDash is problematic? Does this person have the time to customize their solutions to every family's needs? It's insanity. It's an argument that leads nowhere at all; it's an abdication of responsibility (which is totally unnecessary, because the commenter never had a responsibility to change the situation). Hell, it's a call for the audience to also abdicate responsibility they might feel. It's just a useless or harmful way of telling listeners how proud one is to be a statistical exception.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Yeah I was basically agreeing with you.
- thfuran 2y ago
  >making choices that go against the grain of the market. It does take a conscious effort, and it's true that most consumers just don't care or can't be bothered with it No, it's not that most people are interior and follow the market, it's that the market literally is what most people do. If everyone "went against the market", they'd just have moved the market.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> Customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital Source? The best argument against this is how elastic demand was when ZIRP ended. Customers responded to an underpriced product. When the price was raised to a profit-clearing level, it no longer cleared most of the market.

digging 2y ago
I don't understand your argument. It sounds like customers were reacting to their environment more than driving change.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > sounds like customers were reacting to their environment more than driving change It sounds like customers had agency. Tides of capital gave them more or fewer options, and they chose them at their discretion when the terms were advantageous. When they weren't, ever or any longer, they didn't.
  - digging 2y ago
    ...In other words, because DoorDash is convenient and advantageous for customers, they choose to get food delivered instead of go to the restaurant. And admonishing people for choosing the advantageous option is useless, at best. Does that not follow?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      You argued "customer behavior is driven by the tides of capital." That's attributing cause and effect. The tides of capital didn't cause the customer behaviour, it enabled existing behaviour to scale. Capital driving behaviour describes diamonds, not DoorDash.
      - digging 2y ago
        I'm really confused by your reply, and it doesn't answer the question I posed, so maybe that's that.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

There is no doubt that advertising has a huge impact on customer behavior. But that doesn't mean that consumers are incapable of making choices that go against the grain of the market. It does take a conscious effort, and it's true that most consumers just don't care or can't be bothered with it, or are crushed by too many other things in our modern society to have the bandwidth to even consider their choices.

digging 2y ago
Everything you're saying is exactly in accord with what I posted. Individuals always have choice, but when we're looking at an entire population and seeing that large amounts of people are making a choice that we think is "bad", saying, "Well people just need to stop making bad choices. People are stupid. I make good choices." is ludicrous. Let's assume that the answer really is to ensure individual choices are changed. Who's going to go house to house and educate everyone about why the choice to use DoorDash is problematic? Does this person have the time to customize their solutions to every family's needs? It's insanity. It's an argument that leads nowhere at all; it's an abdication of responsibility (which is totally unnecessary, because the commenter never had a responsibility to change the situation). Hell, it's a call for the audience to also abdicate responsibility they might feel. It's just a useless or harmful way of telling listeners how proud one is to be a statistical exception.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Yeah I was basically agreeing with you.
thfuran 2y ago
>making choices that go against the grain of the market. It does take a conscious effort, and it's true that most consumers just don't care or can't be bothered with it No, it's not that most people are interior and follow the market, it's that the market literally is what most people do. If everyone "went against the market", they'd just have moved the market.