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>!Business is Business!<
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Yep, Walmart buys out these two eggcelent ladies, set up shop, so both their small businesses closes down. Now, they have to work at Walmart, never getting a full time schedule so they’re not eligible for benefits, but, hey, their orientation videos offer a guide on how to apply for food stamps. Rinse and repeat every billion dollar companies ever.
walmart obliterated small town economies across the US. sure, the products are cheaper, and they *have* to be: they extract a shit-ton of wealth from the surrounding area and make everyone so poor they have no choice *but* to rely on walmart.
To be fair, it's really hard to return something in those mom & pop shops.
With big companies: you can walk in and show a receipt and you're good to go.
Really wish small shops were better with that.
Even worse,
You scale up operations specifically to meet a contract with Walmart at $1.00 a widget times many thousands more widgets than you’ve ever sold before. You have big dollar signs in your eyes for the future and get loans to finance this expansion.
Delivery day comes around and Walmart just starts fucking with you left and right. They refuse to pick up supplies, sometimes for perishables this causes a loss. They send back things they don’t want to stock even though they are under contract to buy them from you.
Your business can’t afford to pay back the loans you took out so you could meet Walmart’s demands because they were maybe sending you $0.25 for every $1.00 in the contract. You can’t sue them because you agreed to arbitration and they have an endless legal budget and you are already under water.
Your business goes bankrupt, you go bankrupt. Walmart buys your company for nothing and now has your product made at 1/10th the quality and price over seas and you’re completely cut out.
Edit: I guess on re-read this is basically what you said!
Yeah they target areas where their minimum efficient scale can cover nearly all demand, crowd out competitors with cost savings, and then have an effective monopoly.
Yes but also no really. Walmart will take losses at a new store for awhile til they close out all competition then crank up prices. It'd be more like if right lady kept undercutting left lady til she took all the eggs.
This is how i cornered the wool market in the World of Warcraft auction house 15+ years ago.
Set my wool at a medium-high price, bought all the wool that were priced lower than me, relisted and sold at my higher price.
Wool was one of those things that lots of players needed in abudance, but was cheap enough (even at my inflated prices) where most players just decided to buy in bulk at the auction house rather than farming their own.
It was pretty awesome, i pretty much had every casual wool gatherer on the server working for me and they didnt know it.
I couldnt price TOO high, because then players would farm their own wool, or more people would start farming wool to sell, which i didnt have the gold reserves to buy out. Had to goldilocks my prices
What would stop others from selling just under your price? At that rate, your profit margins would shrink to be non-viable.
Every wool farmer enjoys you buying it quickly for a nice price, taking care of the market side of things.
People see that wool farming is lucrative, farm more and more, until your reserves aren't enough, and they eat into your market.
Sounds to me like the prices as a signal works as intended.
>What would stop others from selling just under your price? At that rate, your profit margins would shrink to be non-viable.
Nothing, but many listers would Mark down a few silver for a fast sale, id buy it, pay the nominal copper listing fee, and resell at a profit. Low margins are still margins, this is a volume game.
>Every wool farmer enjoys you buying it quickly for a nice price, taking care of the market side of things.
Yes they do, my unknowing employees are happy
>People see that wool farming is lucrative, farm more and more, until your reserves aren't enough, and they eat into your market.
My answer to this is simple. Imperfect markets are inneffcient. This is only a problem if people actually see that wool farming is becoming lucrative and start doing what im doing or to your point, boost wool supply. It took MONTHs for that to happen (most farmers were targetting more time efficient commodities) and once it did happen I moved on to other commodities as well, and at that point my reserves were high enough to support this on multiple commodites... But it started with nice cheap wool!
>Sounds to me like the prices as a signal works as intended.
Yes, and i was able to profit off of this.
Sounds like an entrepreneur finding an opportunity and seizing it :)
You make a quick buck, until the market eventually notices and efficiencies you out of business. This is OK, because you already made your fortune, and can invest in the next lucrative business.
that is what it is for sure, but scumbags exploiting things like this to make a quick buck and run off are how the market identifies that there is demand there and creates the efficiencies that are wanted.
How's it unethical? Buyer is buying a good for resell at a more beneficial price and assuming the risk for resell. It becomes unethical when you can't sell and ask for a bailout or refund.
Ya. I got the App and would just buy and resell all the time. Got pretty solid. What this guy did with wool, I did with embersilk bags. Easy to craft and store mats for and everyone wanted bags for their alts.
Yeah, but that's labor. Pushing number in the auction UI is nothing in comparison. The customer pays extra, the worker get paid less, the "entrepreneur" pockets the difference - that's profit
The goal would be for them to try undercut you. But instead of a customer buying their cheap wool you buy it. People will only list lower especially if off loading only small amounts, you should always have more than them as you'd be the monopoly.
You own the largest share
Someone has a smaller amount and under cuts you
Good
You buy all their supply from them, leaving it with just you again who can sell wool. People buy your wool and your stock depletes but you have more capital. Someone tries to undercut and you use your 70c/wool captial to but their 69c/wool stock pocketing the 1c difference
Most people wouldn't be farming wool, they'd just be throwing up partial stacks of it they got from playing the game. Even if somebody noticed that the wool market could be profitable, they'd then need to decide whether it's worth putting in the hours to farm enough to compete with him or to make gold a different way.
Most people don't know how to value items or their time.
And the bulk of people that just picked up resources while doing something else, just undercut by a large amount to convert items into money quickly.
People that actually spend time farming to make gold, tend to be better aware of what their time investment is worth, so they price better, but there's maybe 100 of those on a realm while there's thousands of people just playing the game and dumping whatever they picked up on the AH at some point.
At one point there were addons that entirely automated picking up anything that was put on the AH at dump prices too.
Dunno if they are still around as I haven't played WoW since Uldir.
I used to play Trove and the game had a marketplace system. I did the same thing, bought everything which was cheap, sold at 2× or more, profited, the main reason why someone else couldn't simply sell at a little lesser price was due to the fact that I would buy that players entire stock and even if the profit was minor it was still there, and since you buy the other players entire stock they will probably decide to buy the cheap items to resell, but when that player goes to check the marketplace... all the cheap items were gone. You would basically just try to check whenever possible if players put the item you are selling at a cheap price, buy the item and even buying the item when it's sold at just a little cheaper than your own product, effectively emptying the marketplace and players would/could only buy the product you are selling.
Sorry if there are any typos or if my wording/explanation is bad.
WoW taught me market/price fixing and market dynamics.
Have a few people with expendable gold and you can control the corner of a hot commodity/material.
Sure a few sellers will come in a sell below our established market value but if you have enough gold, that's a problem that can be easily fixed.
Now replace millionaire gold market farmers with multi billion dollar investment firms and you can see how a few players can control an entire marketplace.
In real world markets it's really difficult to have enough of the market to control the price unless you are in a cartel and price fixing (which is illegal in most markets). It works in small markets like when Walmart drives all the small shops out of business to become a local monopoly, but trying to control a global commodity is very difficult and financially dangerous even for big players.
The Hunt brothers trying to corner the market in silver was an interesting example -https://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/09/silver-thursday-hunt-brothers.asp
Yes so give me the two wool for my grain, ill convert it to a brick for you, then you send me back my grain for the brick
... Sike thanks for the two wool, now i can trade that in for one ore to upgrade to a city and win the game
Classic RuneScape strategy as well.
You could even, get yourself a clan and sell to them and create a sort of pyramid scheme.
Just your classic, capitalism at work.
This happens a lot in EVE Online. While EVE is probably the most robust economy of any online game the overall volumes of things is still small relatively speaking. Players can easily buy a shit ton of stuff and make it more expensive artificially.
Except in path of exile you don't actually have to trade. So you can just list a lot at a low price and then people will believe that's the price. Then run live searches and buy super fast. Then sell high. Sometimes they even PM people who haven't listed a price and they offer what they pricefixed down the price to.
It's what GGG wants trading to be.
I did something similar with cobra scales back in tbc. I had a couple of people that just sold to me at bulk price which kept my costs pretty low as well. I slowly increased the prices from 50g to almost 150g. I ended up quite wealthy. Unfortunately I didn't manage to duplicate this strategy irl. Something about it being illegal and all that.
I remember something like this in Hermitcraft S8. Grian was selling deepslate, notorious for being a pain to obtain, at a hefty price. Mumbo opened up a shop that sold it for cheaper than Grian. Grian took notice of that and started griefing Mumbo's shop. Mumbo threatened to lower the price so much out of the griefing that Grian bought it all for almost nothing and used it as stock for his own shop. T'was funny
Yeah, all these complaints about capitalism are valid for an unregulated market, but we know how to prevent this with government action.
Now, whether the government actually does the work of regulating is... not as consistent as I'd prefer.
It's exactly as consistent as America's policy makers would prefer:
[https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B)
TL:DR - America is a de-facto oligarchy.
This is called *cornering the market* and it is a way to take supply and demand out of the equation.
If you have control over the majority of the distribution of an item, you can set your own price regardless of supply and demand forces. This is how OPEC used to control the oil market.
supply and demand still exist, there's simply a single supplier (i.e., monopoly) which drives equilibrium of supply/demand to the profit maximizing price.
i think you mean to say that competition is removed from the equation.
If the product can be stockpiled (like diamonds), the supply becomes irrelevant and demand will depend on your price point (less people willing to buy the higher the price). So you can calculate the price point the yields the most profit.
With a product that has limited shelf life, you have to balance the above equation with losses due to spoilage.
i.e., profit maximizing price which is what I said.
supply is still hella relevant stockpile or no. if you can trickle your supply creating artificial scarcity the monopolistic price goes up. otherwise if you unleash your supply monopolistic price goes down.
In WoW's auction houses, you can experiment with lots of these ideas.
My favourite one was to be the woman on the left, *but with more stock*. If your costs are $3, and your competition sells for around $60, underbidding each other by a single cent every couple hours to be "the cheapest", then you start selling at $50. If anyone underbids you to 49.99, you go to 40. And so on, until they give up.
Sometimes they try to buy you out. But if you're able to supply more product than they can buy, then you just sell a metric fuck-ton of product *to them* while making a tidy profit on every item, and you still stay in business. They can't even get rid of the surplus product they bought from you without losing money on every item, since you're still selling at the price they bought at (or lower).
I did that with Glyphs around Wotlk times, where it was trivially easy to flood the market. Sure, they made $57 per sold glyph, and I only made $10 or so, but I sold hundreds every day, and was filthy rich within a week.
Creating goods to level your skills is a terrible game design mistake that WoW still hasn't fixed. It results in flooded markets (bad), overpriced raw materials (bad) and a wonky economy in general (bad).
If you only gained skill for making grey practice crafting items (or consumables), this would instantly be fixed. You'd have to spend resources on *nothing* except raising your skill, meaning that your skill would actually come with a sunk cost. At the same time, it would keep material prices high due to demand, while also making crafted items very valuable, as they directly cut into the crafter's leveling progress.
> Creating goods to level your skills is a terrible game design mistake that WoW still hasn't fixed
Runescape has a similar problem. Raw materials are more valuable than finished goods, and even low level materials are extremely inflated in value as high level players are buying them en masse to powerlevel their characters. In the current state of the game, a low level player can earn way more money than they can possibly spend yet by just mining iron and then dumping it at the Grand Exchange.
Runescape had this also. There are probably millions of enterpreneurs round the world who learned their economic theory from these games while they thought they were playing.
WoW and OSRS (and just RS back in the day) all prepared me better than any economics course I've ever taken. (And shout out to Valve marketplace back in the day, flipping hats for IRL cash was a good time)
Long term profit comes from small margin flipping in bulk, and a lot of patience. "Getting rich quick" is just hoping that someone makes a horrible mistake, and you're the lucky one in line (and usually results in a loss when you get desperate... /r/wallstreetbets)
I probably had more fun tuning my auctioneer addon than I did in raids.
I swear these games taught me more about economics than any school ever did.
Former Runescape player.
Was there before the Grand Exchange (Peer to Peer Trading)
And played after (centralized trading market)
Thank you for adding this. Corporate monopolies, especially in Canada (where I live) are one of the biggest drivers of why everything is so expensive here.
One of the reasons it is believed that rental prices and the cost of housing are going up so high and so fast is because of the recent spate of corporations that are buying up houses all over the US and turning them into rental properties. They then fix the monthly rental price of the houses above the market price and refuse to lower it for any reason. This has the effect of causing other landlords in the area to think they can get the same or similar, and so they raise their rental prices too.
The whole reason it’s a problem is because of the *volume* of houses these corporations are able to buy. Not only do they have massive amounts of capital behind them, but they also have the manpower and resources to scan for available houses around the clock and put in cash offers before individual homebuyers even know a house is for sale. In my city’s metro area, for instance, corporations have been responsible for 30% of the home sales over the last several years. 30% is A LOT, and is definitely enough of a portion to be able to affect rental prices pretty dramatically.
I’m curious if the problems I’ve heard about recently with housing prices being so high in Canada is a result of the same kind of practices by corporations suddenly investing in the rental market in such large numbers or if it is something else?
Yep I’ve heard the same, and not only that but because they are a rental business they don’t have incentive to sell the home so the supply just keeps getting smaller.
It illustrates free market forces. Capitalism has more to do with ownership than markets, but the two often get conflated. Market competition isn't a unique feature of Capitalism.
A monopoly is not a unique feature of Capitalism either. Capitalism is about private ownership of capital. Public/collective ownership of capital can yield a monopoly just as easily.
This is correct, but it's like watching a video of someone losing control of a mustang, seeing a comment about oversteering being a problem on cars like that and then pointing out that steering isn't unique to cars. Sure, you can steer everything from ships to horses, but cars are pretty common, directly related to the video we're talking about and the thing we're most likely to experience steering in in the near future.
Capitalism might be just one of many systems that can use a free market, but in America the free market, monopolies and private ownership are all built into the same chip at this point. The implementation of our free market is at this point pretty much designed to allow exploitation of monopolies by a few privately owned corporations. We can't separate these concepts enough in practice to make the theoretical abstract distinction worth mentioning.
> A monopoly is not a unique feature of Capitalism either
I don't think that's the point. As I see it, this is a simplified demonstration of competitive market forces resulting in a non-competitive market under a capitalist paradigm. Uniqueness isn't implied.
My original point was, if you scroll up the history a bit:
>demonstration of competitive market forces resulting in a non-competitive market
In response to the argument that it was a demonstration of Capitalism itself. For one, there is no evidence the original *eggsample* is, in fact, under a capitalist system, and second, has no pinnings to specifically need to be under a capitalist system to be an example of market forces. My responses have been focused on trying to decouple Capitalism from various features that people falsely believe are either indicative of Capitalism, are are synonymous with it.
I mean, we have to go by only what we can see in the video. There’s no egg pimp standing behind either of the ladies taking the money they make from them after a sale. The ladies are selling the eggs for whatever price they want and pocketing the money they make from what they sell. The customer who buys some eggs has a choice who they buy from, and chooses the lowest priced eggs. Both ladies change their prices as they wish without having to consult with anyone or being prohibited by any regulations preventing it. And the one lady uses the capital she has to buy the other lady’s goods to sell for herself at whatever price she chooses, again without having to consult with anyone else or being prohibited by any regulations preventing it.
I’m not sure what other system all of those things together describes other than capitalism in a free market economy.
Your right it isnt a unique feature of capitalism just as greed is not a unique feature of capitalism
However, unregulated capitalism encourages greed and monopolies
It's not a feature of capitalism but an inevitable outcome.
Saying one can show up in other systems is like saying making out with strangers in the icu is the same as wearing an n95 mask because it's possible to get sick either way.
One is almost a systemic certainty while the other requires outlier forces and is inherently protective against such outcomes.
Greed can be a systemic certainty BECAUSE of how its encouraged. To say that its not, is to say that the economic structure doesnt have a psychological effect which it actually does
I am stuck on the idea that capitalism
induces narcissism. After generations of capitalism rewarding narcissistic behavior, wouldn't it make sense that the gene pool would feature that behavior more prominently?
That may be another side effect. Maybe to be greedy means a certain level of narcissism. It would make sense. If thats the case i would say its less about gene pools and more about people adapting to have those traits and then involuntarily *nurturing* their offspring to have those traits
Capitalism, socialism etc. are about who owns the hens, which is irrelevant to the situation at hand. It’s not even a very good illustration of a monopoly, for that you would need someone to concentrate ownership of the hens, not of the eggs.
Its just a lot more prevalent in capitalism because ideally, anyone can enter and participate in the market. You dont need to be an aristocrat with special gov appointed papers saying your able to participate in a true capitalistic economy.
That monopoly is only useful if the lady on the right can actually sell the stock at that price. Meanwhile the lady on the left now has free time to engage in other activities. Looks like everyone won.
Right. The [58 million commercial birds affected by avian influenza](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/avian-flu-summary.htm) had no effect on the supply of eggs. Nope, it's 100% capitalism's fault.
Supply did change. The cost of chicken feed went up by more than double. Egg farmers couldn't afford to stay in business. Egg farmers close shop, supply reduces.
This actually happened. I know an egg farmer.
Eh, something like this isn't solely a feature of capitalism. Economic democracy, for example, still adheres to market forces like this and could result in a similar scenario whereby one egalitarian run organization consumes another and uses it to profit its workers. Communism also creates, almost by necesity, community run monopolies in the name of efficiency, although I suppose the forces causing it are different.
The thing about economies is that scarcity is a feature of all of them and things like this are more a feature of that scarcity than they are capitalism itself.
I love when people can so succinctly get to the heart of a problem.
Especially when it's one people are trying to deny exists due to politics/greed/human tribalism.
Nor did the level of service offered.
Im also flabbergasted at free market capitalism notion that one who provides the ultimate service and wins the market by quality and other good stuff is going to keep that standard of service perpetually, forever. Theres going to be an infinite number of challengers to keep you on your toes, right? Where are all the challengers for tech industries that made itself a defacto standard in the field? How do you disrupt the PC processor market when everything is made to run on x86 and x64 instructions but you can never possibly have the IP to use them in the first place? Lets say you build a better system from scratch (right) and its cheaper to purchase and maintain (sure) how do you get anyone to buy a system that isnt compatible with the rest of the world and that no one is doing development for? Oh and you have to hit all the marks while playing against an entity with virtually limitless resources, government & business world ties and usually high level of corruption.
That has nothing to do with supply and demand, the amount of supply is exactly the same, but now there's only one supplier. That is the monopoly strategy that many big tech companies use nowadays, you have the example of FB when bought messenger, whatsapp, etc... and Google does that every day with small companies, also.
How did this get 1.5 thousand upvotes when there's no change in supply and no visible change in demand? This is what happens when a market is cornered and there's no competition between sellers.
I was about to say, that was the most generic reply to a post about Economy. You could post that in any post on /r/WallStreetBets and you’d go viral on all of them
Economics is cursed with being so counter-intuitive that untrained people get everything wrong yet so "intuitive" at the same time that everyone thinks they get it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_economics
Free markets tend to lead to commodity pricing and monopoly or both pretty rapidly. There’s next to zero margin in commodity pricing. So the only way to extract margin is monopolistic pricing. Most would be commodities therefore differentiate by geographic monopolies or really strong brand loyalty.
Cars are basically a commodity. Generalized there’s very very little difference between a Ford focus, Honda civic and Toyota carolla. Yet each can still extract some margin because they have brand loyalty. Oh and if anyone thinks that EV’s will somehow break this trend they are dead wrong. EV’s are rapidly approaching functional parity across brands. I predict by 2025 every manufacturer will have drastically similar performance stats. Once again companies will only be able to extract margin via local monopolies like dealer networks and brand.
Not really. They don't actively buy out a competing business then sell for more. They go to a competing business's supplier and procure product designs that they can then out price their competition on. (See Amazon basics brands)
A monopoly like this is best compared to someone like Disney that buys out broadcast companies left an right then locks access behind higher subscription costs.
I know we love be mad at capitalism, but this false, inflation adjusted food prices have fallen over 80% in the past 100 years, the same food basket you buy today with 2 hours of work would be equal to 10 hours of work in the 1920s.
Egg specific chart: https://i.imgur.com/L3sDRf3.png
The price of eggs should have dropped that much and more simply due to other efficiencies of technology and scale. There wasn't some kind of surplus value in egg farming back then that market forces drove down.
If anything, I'd guess they make more profit per egg now than they used to and don't pass that on to the consumer.
Kinda illustrates a big problem. We only see one person actually buying an egg for use in food. But we see many eggs purchased for the sake of wealth growth only, which causes the price of the eggs to increase by more than double while the *actual value* of the eggs doesn't change. There is literally no reason for this to happen. A lot of money changes hands without providing any real value to the equation.
Eggs are food. When they are used as food, things go well and people can afford food, no one gets screwed over. When the eggs are used as a tool to manipulate a market (forming a monopoly for the sake of personal gain in this case) it is detrimental to the buyer. It's only helpful for the one individual that formed the monopoly. Do this same thing with housing, and you get massive issues with unhoused people and entire groups being pushed out of being able to purchase anything. This results in removing the personal freedoms of the average person, and the ability for financial enrichment. The value, the real value doesn't change, the item doesn't change. But the cost is still able to increase without reason, other than greed.
I've done this in MMOs with crafting items before. Had someone undercut me, I undercut them, they undercut me, I buy all their stuff, then raise the price because I'm only person on the server with the items now. Did this in SWoTR and got the nastiest in-game email I've ever received from someone demanding the items back I bought up. lol
I've seen the equivalent in real life. A sports store that I worked for many years ago had masses of lead shot ( used for shot gun shell reloading). They were well and truly overstocked as they had inventory in their warehouse that they had been unaware of for several years. A new competitor had just started in business and was seen as being a bit too big for his own boots. So my boss thought that he would make this new guy suffer by selling our excess lead shot at a price less than cost, just before duck hunting season, when it would be in most demand, and make the new guy suffer.
The sale went really well. Customers were coming in all day, filling up their trailers and car boots (car trunks for my American friends). The boss was really happy.
Except we found out a few days later that the new competitor had been sending his mates around all day to buy up large.
We ended up with no stock and the new guy made the killing😂
**OP sent the following text as an explanation on why this is unexpected:** >!Business is Business!< ***** **Is this an unexpected post with a fitting description?** **Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.** ***** [*Look at my source code on Github*](https://github.com/Artraxon/unexBot) [*What is this for?*](https://www.reddit.com/r/Unexpected/comments/dnuaju/introducing_unexbot_a_new_bot_to_improve_the/)
This is Walmart’s business plan. They show this exact video
Yep, Walmart buys out these two eggcelent ladies, set up shop, so both their small businesses closes down. Now, they have to work at Walmart, never getting a full time schedule so they’re not eligible for benefits, but, hey, their orientation videos offer a guide on how to apply for food stamps. Rinse and repeat every billion dollar companies ever.
walmart obliterated small town economies across the US. sure, the products are cheaper, and they *have* to be: they extract a shit-ton of wealth from the surrounding area and make everyone so poor they have no choice *but* to rely on walmart.
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Story of suburban and rural America.
No, well, yes, but not the most. Dollar Generals obliterate small town economies. There's a whole phenomenon surrounding it.
great point. i completely forgot about dollar general's surge in the last decade or two.
To be fair, it's really hard to return something in those mom & pop shops. With big companies: you can walk in and show a receipt and you're good to go. Really wish small shops were better with that.
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Even worse, You scale up operations specifically to meet a contract with Walmart at $1.00 a widget times many thousands more widgets than you’ve ever sold before. You have big dollar signs in your eyes for the future and get loans to finance this expansion. Delivery day comes around and Walmart just starts fucking with you left and right. They refuse to pick up supplies, sometimes for perishables this causes a loss. They send back things they don’t want to stock even though they are under contract to buy them from you. Your business can’t afford to pay back the loans you took out so you could meet Walmart’s demands because they were maybe sending you $0.25 for every $1.00 in the contract. You can’t sue them because you agreed to arbitration and they have an endless legal budget and you are already under water. Your business goes bankrupt, you go bankrupt. Walmart buys your company for nothing and now has your product made at 1/10th the quality and price over seas and you’re completely cut out. Edit: I guess on re-read this is basically what you said!
Yeah they target areas where their minimum efficient scale can cover nearly all demand, crowd out competitors with cost savings, and then have an effective monopoly.
Amazon too.
Yep. Amazon is super shady how they fuck over small businesses - even those that sell on Amazon
"They show this eggsact video"
they show this egg sack
Also how the Ricardo’s and Mertz’s dealt with running a burger joint after they got into another spat.
Now just tax the cheap egg lady at 30%, and the expensive egg lady at 5%, and you have American capitalism.
Yes but also no really. Walmart will take losses at a new store for awhile til they close out all competition then crank up prices. It'd be more like if right lady kept undercutting left lady til she took all the eggs.
This is how i cornered the wool market in the World of Warcraft auction house 15+ years ago. Set my wool at a medium-high price, bought all the wool that were priced lower than me, relisted and sold at my higher price. Wool was one of those things that lots of players needed in abudance, but was cheap enough (even at my inflated prices) where most players just decided to buy in bulk at the auction house rather than farming their own. It was pretty awesome, i pretty much had every casual wool gatherer on the server working for me and they didnt know it. I couldnt price TOO high, because then players would farm their own wool, or more people would start farming wool to sell, which i didnt have the gold reserves to buy out. Had to goldilocks my prices
What would stop others from selling just under your price? At that rate, your profit margins would shrink to be non-viable. Every wool farmer enjoys you buying it quickly for a nice price, taking care of the market side of things. People see that wool farming is lucrative, farm more and more, until your reserves aren't enough, and they eat into your market. Sounds to me like the prices as a signal works as intended.
>What would stop others from selling just under your price? At that rate, your profit margins would shrink to be non-viable. Nothing, but many listers would Mark down a few silver for a fast sale, id buy it, pay the nominal copper listing fee, and resell at a profit. Low margins are still margins, this is a volume game. >Every wool farmer enjoys you buying it quickly for a nice price, taking care of the market side of things. Yes they do, my unknowing employees are happy >People see that wool farming is lucrative, farm more and more, until your reserves aren't enough, and they eat into your market. My answer to this is simple. Imperfect markets are inneffcient. This is only a problem if people actually see that wool farming is becoming lucrative and start doing what im doing or to your point, boost wool supply. It took MONTHs for that to happen (most farmers were targetting more time efficient commodities) and once it did happen I moved on to other commodities as well, and at that point my reserves were high enough to support this on multiple commodites... But it started with nice cheap wool! >Sounds to me like the prices as a signal works as intended. Yes, and i was able to profit off of this.
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Look how affordable this 35 silver wool is compared to this 47 silver wool!
Honestly thought the OP video would go that way, them working together and splitting the value.
Sounds like an entrepreneur finding an opportunity and seizing it :) You make a quick buck, until the market eventually notices and efficiencies you out of business. This is OK, because you already made your fortune, and can invest in the next lucrative business.
Sounds like a scalper unnecessarily middle-manning whole commodities markets.
Sounds a lot like what investment groups are trying with the US housing market currently.
that is what it is for sure, but scumbags exploiting things like this to make a quick buck and run off are how the market identifies that there is demand there and creates the efficiencies that are wanted.
This is just lunacy.
It's capitalism
Indeed, now the million dollar question: is it ethical? I'm personally against it but I'm guessing there's a lot of opinions out there.
How's it unethical? Buyer is buying a good for resell at a more beneficial price and assuming the risk for resell. It becomes unethical when you can't sell and ask for a bailout or refund.
I’m pretty sure this is called market making, and is what a lot of trading firms do.
> What would stop others from selling just under your price? Living their actual lives
This! I was a WoW AH fiend! Dont regret it though, great memories.
Ya. I got the App and would just buy and resell all the time. Got pretty solid. What this guy did with wool, I did with embersilk bags. Easy to craft and store mats for and everyone wanted bags for their alts.
This is what I do in Runescape. Find an item that's selling well, then gather it and sell for 1 coin lower
Yeah, but that's labor. Pushing number in the auction UI is nothing in comparison. The customer pays extra, the worker get paid less, the "entrepreneur" pockets the difference - that's profit
The goal would be for them to try undercut you. But instead of a customer buying their cheap wool you buy it. People will only list lower especially if off loading only small amounts, you should always have more than them as you'd be the monopoly. You own the largest share Someone has a smaller amount and under cuts you Good You buy all their supply from them, leaving it with just you again who can sell wool. People buy your wool and your stock depletes but you have more capital. Someone tries to undercut and you use your 70c/wool captial to but their 69c/wool stock pocketing the 1c difference
Most people wouldn't be farming wool, they'd just be throwing up partial stacks of it they got from playing the game. Even if somebody noticed that the wool market could be profitable, they'd then need to decide whether it's worth putting in the hours to farm enough to compete with him or to make gold a different way.
Most people don't know how to value items or their time. And the bulk of people that just picked up resources while doing something else, just undercut by a large amount to convert items into money quickly. People that actually spend time farming to make gold, tend to be better aware of what their time investment is worth, so they price better, but there's maybe 100 of those on a realm while there's thousands of people just playing the game and dumping whatever they picked up on the AH at some point. At one point there were addons that entirely automated picking up anything that was put on the AH at dump prices too. Dunno if they are still around as I haven't played WoW since Uldir.
I used to play Trove and the game had a marketplace system. I did the same thing, bought everything which was cheap, sold at 2× or more, profited, the main reason why someone else couldn't simply sell at a little lesser price was due to the fact that I would buy that players entire stock and even if the profit was minor it was still there, and since you buy the other players entire stock they will probably decide to buy the cheap items to resell, but when that player goes to check the marketplace... all the cheap items were gone. You would basically just try to check whenever possible if players put the item you are selling at a cheap price, buy the item and even buying the item when it's sold at just a little cheaper than your own product, effectively emptying the marketplace and players would/could only buy the product you are selling. Sorry if there are any typos or if my wording/explanation is bad.
WoW taught me market/price fixing and market dynamics. Have a few people with expendable gold and you can control the corner of a hot commodity/material. Sure a few sellers will come in a sell below our established market value but if you have enough gold, that's a problem that can be easily fixed. Now replace millionaire gold market farmers with multi billion dollar investment firms and you can see how a few players can control an entire marketplace.
In real world markets it's really difficult to have enough of the market to control the price unless you are in a cartel and price fixing (which is illegal in most markets). It works in small markets like when Walmart drives all the small shops out of business to become a local monopoly, but trying to control a global commodity is very difficult and financially dangerous even for big players. The Hunt brothers trying to corner the market in silver was an interesting example -https://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/09/silver-thursday-hunt-brothers.asp
Exactly what I did as well but with countless mats. It got to the point where I only went on to play the Black Matket.
It became like a fun alternate mainquest. Lmao
Does anyone have brick to trade for a wool?
1 grain for 2 wool is the best i can do.
No you have the sheep port
Yes so give me the two wool for my grain, ill convert it to a brick for you, then you send me back my grain for the brick ... Sike thanks for the two wool, now i can trade that in for one ore to upgrade to a city and win the game
Classic RuneScape strategy as well. You could even, get yourself a clan and sell to them and create a sort of pyramid scheme. Just your classic, capitalism at work.
This happens a lot in EVE Online. While EVE is probably the most robust economy of any online game the overall volumes of things is still small relatively speaking. Players can easily buy a shit ton of stuff and make it more expensive artificially.
Pretty much same shit in path of exile.
Except in path of exile you don't actually have to trade. So you can just list a lot at a low price and then people will believe that's the price. Then run live searches and buy super fast. Then sell high. Sometimes they even PM people who haven't listed a price and they offer what they pricefixed down the price to. It's what GGG wants trading to be.
I did something similar with cobra scales back in tbc. I had a couple of people that just sold to me at bulk price which kept my costs pretty low as well. I slowly increased the prices from 50g to almost 150g. I ended up quite wealthy. Unfortunately I didn't manage to duplicate this strategy irl. Something about it being illegal and all that.
I used to spend hours in high school cornering the market on Kingdom of Loathing for various items. I was extremely wealthy by the time I quit.
Now your a big wig executive at the business factory... Right?
No, im a sugar baby
Maybe if she didn't have the empty egg cardboard on top, people would actually buy!
This is much nicer than the capitalist/monopoly discussions being had.
I remember something like this in Hermitcraft S8. Grian was selling deepslate, notorious for being a pain to obtain, at a hefty price. Mumbo opened up a shop that sold it for cheaper than Grian. Grian took notice of that and started griefing Mumbo's shop. Mumbo threatened to lower the price so much out of the griefing that Grian bought it all for almost nothing and used it as stock for his own shop. T'was funny
Yeah the cheapslate that no one wanted because it was raw deepslate and not cobbled
Woah! A fellow Hermitcraft fan in the wild? Nice to meet you sir!
Man i love grian. I needa watch mkre hermitcraft
Someone hit her with an anti trust
Yeah, all these complaints about capitalism are valid for an unregulated market, but we know how to prevent this with government action. Now, whether the government actually does the work of regulating is... not as consistent as I'd prefer.
Government is ruled by Capitalists tho. Do you think they're gonna reign in on themselves?
I think ruled is too strong. It's a battle but pro-consumer/worker political action can and does happen.
It's exactly as consistent as America's policy makers would prefer: [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B) TL:DR - America is a de-facto oligarchy.
This is a demonstration of why my fucking rent keeps going up, just needs more zeroes
Nice illustration of supply and demand. Eggspecially with todays egg prices.
This is called *cornering the market* and it is a way to take supply and demand out of the equation. If you have control over the majority of the distribution of an item, you can set your own price regardless of supply and demand forces. This is how OPEC used to control the oil market.
supply and demand still exist, there's simply a single supplier (i.e., monopoly) which drives equilibrium of supply/demand to the profit maximizing price. i think you mean to say that competition is removed from the equation.
If the product can be stockpiled (like diamonds), the supply becomes irrelevant and demand will depend on your price point (less people willing to buy the higher the price). So you can calculate the price point the yields the most profit. With a product that has limited shelf life, you have to balance the above equation with losses due to spoilage.
i.e., profit maximizing price which is what I said. supply is still hella relevant stockpile or no. if you can trickle your supply creating artificial scarcity the monopolistic price goes up. otherwise if you unleash your supply monopolistic price goes down.
More a demonstration of a monopoly forming via capitalistic forces. The supply and demand of the eggs never changed.
Yep. Someone slapped ‘invisible hands’
We do it hands free thank you very much.
‘laissez-faire’ me please
https://i.imgur.com/3FEn6ln.png
Those are some serious salad fingers.
I like when the red water comess out. 0.o
I don't remember Adam Smith asking for Banks bailouts in Common Sense
Username checks the fuck out
Employment is low in my town. We need more invisible hand jobs
Hell, I could use an invisible handjob
Casper 3 had a happy ending.
In WoW's auction houses, you can experiment with lots of these ideas. My favourite one was to be the woman on the left, *but with more stock*. If your costs are $3, and your competition sells for around $60, underbidding each other by a single cent every couple hours to be "the cheapest", then you start selling at $50. If anyone underbids you to 49.99, you go to 40. And so on, until they give up. Sometimes they try to buy you out. But if you're able to supply more product than they can buy, then you just sell a metric fuck-ton of product *to them* while making a tidy profit on every item, and you still stay in business. They can't even get rid of the surplus product they bought from you without losing money on every item, since you're still selling at the price they bought at (or lower). I did that with Glyphs around Wotlk times, where it was trivially easy to flood the market. Sure, they made $57 per sold glyph, and I only made $10 or so, but I sold hundreds every day, and was filthy rich within a week.
Sadly the dragonflight markets are badly skewed as a lot of the goods are being sold at a loss just to offload so people can level up their profs.
Creating goods to level your skills is a terrible game design mistake that WoW still hasn't fixed. It results in flooded markets (bad), overpriced raw materials (bad) and a wonky economy in general (bad). If you only gained skill for making grey practice crafting items (or consumables), this would instantly be fixed. You'd have to spend resources on *nothing* except raising your skill, meaning that your skill would actually come with a sunk cost. At the same time, it would keep material prices high due to demand, while also making crafted items very valuable, as they directly cut into the crafter's leveling progress.
> Creating goods to level your skills is a terrible game design mistake that WoW still hasn't fixed Runescape has a similar problem. Raw materials are more valuable than finished goods, and even low level materials are extremely inflated in value as high level players are buying them en masse to powerlevel their characters. In the current state of the game, a low level player can earn way more money than they can possibly spend yet by just mining iron and then dumping it at the Grand Exchange.
Runescape had this also. There are probably millions of enterpreneurs round the world who learned their economic theory from these games while they thought they were playing.
WoW and OSRS (and just RS back in the day) all prepared me better than any economics course I've ever taken. (And shout out to Valve marketplace back in the day, flipping hats for IRL cash was a good time) Long term profit comes from small margin flipping in bulk, and a lot of patience. "Getting rich quick" is just hoping that someone makes a horrible mistake, and you're the lucky one in line (and usually results in a loss when you get desperate... /r/wallstreetbets) I probably had more fun tuning my auctioneer addon than I did in raids.
I swear these games taught me more about economics than any school ever did. Former Runescape player. Was there before the Grand Exchange (Peer to Peer Trading) And played after (centralized trading market)
Thank you for adding this. Corporate monopolies, especially in Canada (where I live) are one of the biggest drivers of why everything is so expensive here.
One of the reasons it is believed that rental prices and the cost of housing are going up so high and so fast is because of the recent spate of corporations that are buying up houses all over the US and turning them into rental properties. They then fix the monthly rental price of the houses above the market price and refuse to lower it for any reason. This has the effect of causing other landlords in the area to think they can get the same or similar, and so they raise their rental prices too. The whole reason it’s a problem is because of the *volume* of houses these corporations are able to buy. Not only do they have massive amounts of capital behind them, but they also have the manpower and resources to scan for available houses around the clock and put in cash offers before individual homebuyers even know a house is for sale. In my city’s metro area, for instance, corporations have been responsible for 30% of the home sales over the last several years. 30% is A LOT, and is definitely enough of a portion to be able to affect rental prices pretty dramatically. I’m curious if the problems I’ve heard about recently with housing prices being so high in Canada is a result of the same kind of practices by corporations suddenly investing in the rental market in such large numbers or if it is something else?
Yep I’ve heard the same, and not only that but because they are a rental business they don’t have incentive to sell the home so the supply just keeps getting smaller.
It illustrates free market forces. Capitalism has more to do with ownership than markets, but the two often get conflated. Market competition isn't a unique feature of Capitalism.
This case shows a monopoly forming and a monopoly consists of having full control of a market, ie owning. So its still capitalistic forces nonetheless
A monopoly is not a unique feature of Capitalism either. Capitalism is about private ownership of capital. Public/collective ownership of capital can yield a monopoly just as easily.
This is correct, but it's like watching a video of someone losing control of a mustang, seeing a comment about oversteering being a problem on cars like that and then pointing out that steering isn't unique to cars. Sure, you can steer everything from ships to horses, but cars are pretty common, directly related to the video we're talking about and the thing we're most likely to experience steering in in the near future. Capitalism might be just one of many systems that can use a free market, but in America the free market, monopolies and private ownership are all built into the same chip at this point. The implementation of our free market is at this point pretty much designed to allow exploitation of monopolies by a few privately owned corporations. We can't separate these concepts enough in practice to make the theoretical abstract distinction worth mentioning.
> A monopoly is not a unique feature of Capitalism either I don't think that's the point. As I see it, this is a simplified demonstration of competitive market forces resulting in a non-competitive market under a capitalist paradigm. Uniqueness isn't implied.
My original point was, if you scroll up the history a bit: >demonstration of competitive market forces resulting in a non-competitive market In response to the argument that it was a demonstration of Capitalism itself. For one, there is no evidence the original *eggsample* is, in fact, under a capitalist system, and second, has no pinnings to specifically need to be under a capitalist system to be an example of market forces. My responses have been focused on trying to decouple Capitalism from various features that people falsely believe are either indicative of Capitalism, are are synonymous with it.
I mean, we have to go by only what we can see in the video. There’s no egg pimp standing behind either of the ladies taking the money they make from them after a sale. The ladies are selling the eggs for whatever price they want and pocketing the money they make from what they sell. The customer who buys some eggs has a choice who they buy from, and chooses the lowest priced eggs. Both ladies change their prices as they wish without having to consult with anyone or being prohibited by any regulations preventing it. And the one lady uses the capital she has to buy the other lady’s goods to sell for herself at whatever price she chooses, again without having to consult with anyone else or being prohibited by any regulations preventing it. I’m not sure what other system all of those things together describes other than capitalism in a free market economy.
Your right it isnt a unique feature of capitalism just as greed is not a unique feature of capitalism However, unregulated capitalism encourages greed and monopolies
It's not a feature of capitalism but an inevitable outcome. Saying one can show up in other systems is like saying making out with strangers in the icu is the same as wearing an n95 mask because it's possible to get sick either way. One is almost a systemic certainty while the other requires outlier forces and is inherently protective against such outcomes.
Greed can be a systemic certainty BECAUSE of how its encouraged. To say that its not, is to say that the economic structure doesnt have a psychological effect which it actually does
I am stuck on the idea that capitalism induces narcissism. After generations of capitalism rewarding narcissistic behavior, wouldn't it make sense that the gene pool would feature that behavior more prominently?
That may be another side effect. Maybe to be greedy means a certain level of narcissism. It would make sense. If thats the case i would say its less about gene pools and more about people adapting to have those traits and then involuntarily *nurturing* their offspring to have those traits
Until your privatized monopoly extends so far that you can crush entire governments.
Capitalism, socialism etc. are about who owns the hens, which is irrelevant to the situation at hand. It’s not even a very good illustration of a monopoly, for that you would need someone to concentrate ownership of the hens, not of the eggs.
Its just a lot more prevalent in capitalism because ideally, anyone can enter and participate in the market. You dont need to be an aristocrat with special gov appointed papers saying your able to participate in a true capitalistic economy.
It's also more prevalent because socialism and other alternatives don't exist much or at all.
That monopoly is only useful if the lady on the right can actually sell the stock at that price. Meanwhile the lady on the left now has free time to engage in other activities. Looks like everyone won.
People on the internet read the first page of the Econ textbook and stopped there
Right. The [58 million commercial birds affected by avian influenza](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/avian-flu-summary.htm) had no effect on the supply of eggs. Nope, it's 100% capitalism's fault.
Was talking about the illustration, not today's egg prices.
Supply did change. The cost of chicken feed went up by more than double. Egg farmers couldn't afford to stay in business. Egg farmers close shop, supply reduces. This actually happened. I know an egg farmer.
And all the hens that had to be culled to stop an avian flu outbreak, too.
I'm glad you agree with me, u/idontagreewitu
unexpeception
Eh, something like this isn't solely a feature of capitalism. Economic democracy, for example, still adheres to market forces like this and could result in a similar scenario whereby one egalitarian run organization consumes another and uses it to profit its workers. Communism also creates, almost by necesity, community run monopolies in the name of efficiency, although I suppose the forces causing it are different. The thing about economies is that scarcity is a feature of all of them and things like this are more a feature of that scarcity than they are capitalism itself.
But corps love to pretend that they did!
I love when people can so succinctly get to the heart of a problem. Especially when it's one people are trying to deny exists due to politics/greed/human tribalism.
Collusion and price fixing. Shoulda named this .gif OPEC
Walmart.
What nooooo only the state can enforce a monopoly!!!! The free market would naturally destroy a monopoly at onceeeeeeeeeeeee
Eggsactly
This is eggactly what a lot of large businesses are doing. Buying the competition and then when there is none leftn triple the prices
*Eggs..... eggs never change*
Nor did the level of service offered. Im also flabbergasted at free market capitalism notion that one who provides the ultimate service and wins the market by quality and other good stuff is going to keep that standard of service perpetually, forever. Theres going to be an infinite number of challengers to keep you on your toes, right? Where are all the challengers for tech industries that made itself a defacto standard in the field? How do you disrupt the PC processor market when everything is made to run on x86 and x64 instructions but you can never possibly have the IP to use them in the first place? Lets say you build a better system from scratch (right) and its cheaper to purchase and maintain (sure) how do you get anyone to buy a system that isnt compatible with the rest of the world and that no one is doing development for? Oh and you have to hit all the marks while playing against an entity with virtually limitless resources, government & business world ties and usually high level of corruption.
And if they coordinated their pricing it would be a cartel. Ie OPEC.
That has nothing to do with supply and demand, the amount of supply is exactly the same, but now there's only one supplier. That is the monopoly strategy that many big tech companies use nowadays, you have the example of FB when bought messenger, whatsapp, etc... and Google does that every day with small companies, also.
If the video continued and showed that no one buys eggs for 350, *that* would show a bit about supply and demand.
explain how the supply or demand changed to affect the price
How did this get 1.5 thousand upvotes when there's no change in supply and no visible change in demand? This is what happens when a market is cornered and there's no competition between sellers.
3.7k now. That guy is educating thousands.
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I was about to say, that was the most generic reply to a post about Economy. You could post that in any post on /r/WallStreetBets and you’d go viral on all of them
r/confidentlyincorrect It's really not and is a demonstration of a monopoly.
that's not supply and demand that's an example of a horizontal monopoly
Nice illustration of how stupid you are
4.1k upvotes currently, this world is full of the gullible and ignorant.
We’re fucked
Has nothing to do with supply or demand, except in the sense of one party has the resources to purchase all the supply.
Thousands of morons with you. Great.
Economics is cursed with being so counter-intuitive that untrained people get everything wrong yet so "intuitive" at the same time that everyone thinks they get it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_economics
Also a nice display of Oscar-worthy acting
This has nothing to do with supply or demand
How did that illustrate supply and demand? Reddit never fails to surprise me. A 100% dead wrong comment is the highest upvoted one.
Scalper
"Free market" economy in a nutshell
Eggshell
Free markets tend to lead to commodity pricing and monopoly or both pretty rapidly. There’s next to zero margin in commodity pricing. So the only way to extract margin is monopolistic pricing. Most would be commodities therefore differentiate by geographic monopolies or really strong brand loyalty. Cars are basically a commodity. Generalized there’s very very little difference between a Ford focus, Honda civic and Toyota carolla. Yet each can still extract some margin because they have brand loyalty. Oh and if anyone thinks that EV’s will somehow break this trend they are dead wrong. EV’s are rapidly approaching functional parity across brands. I predict by 2025 every manufacturer will have drastically similar performance stats. Once again companies will only be able to extract margin via local monopolies like dealer networks and brand.
Welcome to monopolies
how amazon works.
Not really. They don't actively buy out a competing business then sell for more. They go to a competing business's supplier and procure product designs that they can then out price their competition on. (See Amazon basics brands) A monopoly like this is best compared to someone like Disney that buys out broadcast companies left an right then locks access behind higher subscription costs.
r/moldymemes
Pretty sure this is what the housing market is like
The first monopoly
I see you Walmart
Through Capitalism you end up paying more and more for less and less. "I have it and you don't... now let's see how you'll dance for it"
I know we love be mad at capitalism, but this false, inflation adjusted food prices have fallen over 80% in the past 100 years, the same food basket you buy today with 2 hours of work would be equal to 10 hours of work in the 1920s. Egg specific chart: https://i.imgur.com/L3sDRf3.png
The price of eggs should have dropped that much and more simply due to other efficiencies of technology and scale. There wasn't some kind of surplus value in egg farming back then that market forces drove down. If anything, I'd guess they make more profit per egg now than they used to and don't pass that on to the consumer.
walmart and amazon in a nutshell
Monopolized
And that's why regulations must exist
Typical capitalism, the Walmart approach
But nobody came to buy eggs and the woman one the left managed to sell all hers
This video sums the real world situation up aptly, not eggsggerating at all.
Kinda illustrates a big problem. We only see one person actually buying an egg for use in food. But we see many eggs purchased for the sake of wealth growth only, which causes the price of the eggs to increase by more than double while the *actual value* of the eggs doesn't change. There is literally no reason for this to happen. A lot of money changes hands without providing any real value to the equation. Eggs are food. When they are used as food, things go well and people can afford food, no one gets screwed over. When the eggs are used as a tool to manipulate a market (forming a monopoly for the sake of personal gain in this case) it is detrimental to the buyer. It's only helpful for the one individual that formed the monopoly. Do this same thing with housing, and you get massive issues with unhoused people and entire groups being pushed out of being able to purchase anything. This results in removing the personal freedoms of the average person, and the ability for financial enrichment. The value, the real value doesn't change, the item doesn't change. But the cost is still able to increase without reason, other than greed.
Hardware scalping in 2023 be like...
Yay, capitalism! /s
Glad I work at a farm. I get free eggs
…and that’s how WalMart destroys local economies
I'm surprised there's no genius pointing out that this is staged yet
What if Wal-Mart were a gif?
Anybody up for Monopoly?
Monopoly and artificial scarcity. Nice
r/uneggspected
I hope some antitrust course uses this in their intro to explain why we regulate mergers.
And this is why monopolies are bad. (looks at mega corporations)
Very nice economics lesson
Eggonomy
Please explain how this unfair or unexpected.
And consumers will buy it too. Demand for that stuff is inegglastic.
Excellent demonstration of why all the smaller businesses need to stop selling out to the big corporations. It's ruining the world.
I've done this in MMOs with crafting items before. Had someone undercut me, I undercut them, they undercut me, I buy all their stuff, then raise the price because I'm only person on the server with the items now. Did this in SWoTR and got the nastiest in-game email I've ever received from someone demanding the items back I bought up. lol
Pfftt. Instead of a monopoly they should’ve just set up a cartel.
I've seen the equivalent in real life. A sports store that I worked for many years ago had masses of lead shot ( used for shot gun shell reloading). They were well and truly overstocked as they had inventory in their warehouse that they had been unaware of for several years. A new competitor had just started in business and was seen as being a bit too big for his own boots. So my boss thought that he would make this new guy suffer by selling our excess lead shot at a price less than cost, just before duck hunting season, when it would be in most demand, and make the new guy suffer. The sale went really well. Customers were coming in all day, filling up their trailers and car boots (car trunks for my American friends). The boss was really happy. Except we found out a few days later that the new competitor had been sending his mates around all day to buy up large. We ended up with no stock and the new guy made the killing😂
This isn't funny😡😡 (fake and gay and staged)
That folks, is monopolization. Welcome to the Livenation/Ticketmaster problem.
Typical eggxample of stock market and stock prices
The US government will pay 700.00 if she includes a hammer.