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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Grocery stores know that when people are struggling to afford to eat, they try to save some money by going for the cheaper brands, which are typically owned by the store. Since the store control all the prices, they are able to jack up the price of everything, making their customers go “wow, food is expensive, better try to bargain hunt more”, and suddenly you’re not buying the competitor bread, now you’re buying Western Family / No Name, and they profit both from the price hikes AND because they grow their market share on first-party goods.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffen_good

    It’s fucked up that they are allowed to both make AND sell the same products on the same shelves as their competitor’s goods, but that’s because our antitrust sucks.

    There is NO downside for the store when they make you starve, you still gotta eat to live so you’ll pay anything, and these things are all owned by the same handful of megacorps.







  • That and market share. Between 2007 and now, a website could reliably grow as new people got connected to the internet and as internet usage naturally grew. Up till recently, a large proportion of people either didn’t use the internet at all, or had the internet, but didn’t use much. Prior to 2020 I knew lots of friends and family who simply did not own a home computer or maybe had like one laptop for the whole family (and a bunch of phones).

    During that era, the attention was all on getting new users in the door. Make a good, cheap/free product, and people will come.

    But NOW, most people already are using the internet like 14+ hours a day and have become full netizens. If companies want to keep growing, they can’t rely on new blood, they need to pivot to harvesting more from the people they already have.