That's not last century thinking. You can't create any monopoly for generic drugs, by definition. You're not even forced to buy an an expensive Apple or Google phone. You can buy a 200-300 dollar phone with more than decent specs. They reason why people are running around with 1k phones is because it's a status symbol.
It's exactly this century where you can buy anything at manufacturing cost from India or China if you want to, there's an entire political class upset about it.
I mean I'll give you Comcast, ISPs in the US in particular seem bad, but otherwise? Digital and electronic goods in particular have been driven down to the marginal cost of production, that's why 90% of the former are free.
Sounds like the perfect start-up plan: just open a 50 bucks vitamin C store, and the dominant player will buy you out for $$$. Rinse and repeat for infinite money.
There's usually a x-year non-compete agreement when this happens... I know a guy that does exactly what you describe, starting a new garbage pickup service every 3 years, when the agreement elapses. He then works for ~3-4 years to build it back up. Sold twice already, and on his third.
Laundromat -> liquor store -> hotel -> retire rich is a common path here. Rinse and repeat a couple times at each point, and because you sell each time to the guy trying to do the same thing behind you instead of to a big competitor, there's never non-compete agreements. Bonus in that the first two are recession proof and cash heavy businesses (if you wish to avail yourself of the possibilities that suggests).
Anecdotally, work from home put a crimp in many laundromat businesses. And liquor stores only work in states that do not let the big stores sell liquor. These days, any half decent hotel brand will require a couple million cash (for the down payment), and more for a new build. At least in the western US.
What if there were no agreement? seems like he is the driving successful factor in these businesses, but I'm guessing he'd rather sell his company than get hired by them.
there are example employees I've seen that have this kind of leverage too
For that to work you first have to scale up production and distribution significantly enough to be on their radar. That requires some investment and then the question is whether is an investment, with higher probability of returns.
You missed out the difficult part of distribution. This isn't exactly easy or cheap. Ask Walmart or any other retailer. Even the direct-to-consumer ones have to spend a lot on distribution.
It happens with a lot of stuff. Chocolate candy bars in gas station kiosks are always the same 5 brands. Anybody _could_ make chocolate bars, but the big players make deals to control retail, so you don't get a choice of other candy bars, in the situation you'd typically buy one.
If I control the conditions under which you buy something, I can control what you are going to buy.
Because small chocolate manufacturers don’t have the scale to supply massive distribution companies. An little retail gas stations don’t have any incentive to go make deals with boutique manufacturers. That would be madness for a gas station owner to go to individual manufacturers for specific items. And the manufacturers would hate it. Dealing with hundreds of thousands of small orders would be a logistical pain. That’s the reason their is a distributor layer for those sorts of products. If customers at gas stations started demanding Valrhona chocolate, they’d ask their distributors to start getting it. I’d buy it, but most people at gas stations aren’t going to care about a $10 chocolate bar.
The monopoly is in the illusion of access to choice on shelves. The pharmacy markets is dominated in the US by 2 players - Walgreens and CVS. Heck they even have their own generic meds competing at the same prices
There has to be more to it. If not, a simple refusal to sell would allow you to move the market. If the sellout bundle is profitable enough, why doesn’t everyone start a generic drug company to be sold and retire rich?
Then the competition moves money from profit markets to undercut you... making it impossible to compete... your competition subsedize the costs and effectively sell for 20% below cost until you agree to sell or close shop
small businesses generally can't launch everywhere. a big drug manufacturer can switch to selling at cost in a region for a few months to kill the profit opportunity of a young competitor. also, once they've done that a few times, it prevents others from trying
The missing key concept here is "regulatory capture". In many industries, companies get enough money and power that they can afford to rewrite the laws to lock themselves in and put up a big barrier to entry to keep competition out.
There is no regulation in supplement selling, except for food safety. You can sell sugar branded as Vitamin C, and if your customers aren't going to sue you for false advertising or something, you won't have any problems.
Speculation: Google Translate says it's "lesson" in Romanian; tsimionescu's name might make that make sense.
Possibly connected to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/praelego#Latin and the form praelegere to 'read before' in Latin, either the same kind of lecture/lesson sense, or about the parent comment "reading 'regulatory capture' before should really be 'retail capture'"?
You're right about Romanian, and the best translation is "lecture", but it was just a bilingual predictive keyboard-assisted mistype - the best kind of mistype!
Oops, that's bilingual predictive auto-correct failing, and me not re-reading my comment...
I wanted to say "the problem is retail capture", but somehow it filled in a Romanian word instead... Phone keyboards...
Just for completeness, "prelegeri" would be best translated as "lectures" - it made no sense at all in context, it only happened to match a few letters of what I fat-fingered.
It's a standard feature of many mobile keyboards. I personally use MS SwitfKey, but GBoard has it as well, and I'm sure others have it too. You get to select multiple languages for which they'll do auto-correct, predictive suggestions, and swipe-typing.
It works surprisingly well, but it does sometimes fail pretty spectacularly when you're sloppy and mis-type too many letters. It also can't help much when words are ambiguous (is that an English "in" or a mistyped Romanian "în"?). Still, it's generally a godsend for typing in mixed languages (say, like in Spanglish, where you'll write unas palabras en Ingles, y altras in Spanish). They even include things like names of local politicians or cities or brands.
Windows does seem to have this as well as an option ("Multilingual text suggestions"), but individual apps might not (e.g. I haven't seen it in Outlook).
That seems pretty cool. Maybe one day in the future, after trilingual, quadrilingual, etc., autocorrect, something like Esperanto will be reinvented from the ground up.
>You can buy a 200-300 dollar phone with more than decent specs
Two weeks ago I got a "9.5" (looks brand new, battery too) used Pixel 3a for 100$ on eBay. It's a perfectly fine phone with picture/video quality undersold by it's camera pixel count.
Do you have any idea on how I can avoid the excessive interest rate the bank charges on my mortgage? :) Yes I checked, other banks loans are just as expensive. So it seems I'm not able to buy loans at "manufacturing cost" and neither am I able to buy gas or electricity for minimal cost.
You could get a loan at prime rate if you were a bank. You likely aren’t a bank, so a retail loan is what you get. Prime rate is the interest to the bank. Retail rates are higher because there are costs associated with your loan. Those costs also include the degree of risk to the bank.
Never walk into a BANK and apply for a loan. Use one, or better, a number of mortgage brokers. Make a spreadsheet. Add in all garbage fees. Estimate the life of the loan. Now calculate real APR. Points and garbage fees dominate if you’re going to sell or refinance in a few years.
It's exactly this century where you can buy anything at manufacturing cost from India or China if you want to, there's an entire political class upset about it.
I mean I'll give you Comcast, ISPs in the US in particular seem bad, but otherwise? Digital and electronic goods in particular have been driven down to the marginal cost of production, that's why 90% of the former are free.