story
There was this article a while back I read that talked about how native peoples made poisonous foods edible. Some processes were extremely convoluted and unreasonable, but it worked, and efforts by a "reasonable" man to make the process more efficient would have certainly doomed the whole tribe.
Examples like that really make me question the idea that an efficient economy is the best economy (let alone if capitalism and free markets are ideal).
It really captures the inanity of a person who just sits around crunching numbers all day and killing off people’s beloved products and showing small percentage quarterly gains... while destroying goodwill and long term customer loyalty in the process.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists.
Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.
Oh, no doubt. I'm not saying the spreadsheet guys aren't needed. They clearly are because competition is so stiff. So the reason store A needs spreadsheet guys is because store B has them. All of the spreadsheet guys, collectively, lock the grocery stores into a race to the bottom.
I'm complaining about the existence of spreadsheet guys in the first place. Pulling back a little bit, maybe we need to question whether technology is always beneficial to society? Maybe some technology is inherently worse for society but we can't get rid of it because it's now locked into the market.
I often think that they are the source of endless waste and inefficiency, because they are working against each other and none of them stocks everything.
Personally I'd prefer fewer larger ones which stock really everything in every variety, instead of many smaller ones which don't.
This are really so called first world problems, it's still a cornucopia, though one could argue about the nutritional/health implications also. But again, 1st world problem.
You've linked to SSC; Scott Alexander has a whole other essay on precisely this family of problems: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/.
My corner grocery (run by a family that lives a couple blocks away) did the same thing - they dropped the soy milk brand I like. I asked about it, and they brought it back.
I think they do cost more on average than HugeCo (if you use the HugeCo surveillance/loyalty card), which also theoretically has a larger selection, etc.
But for some weird reason the store that sells me what I want gets my business.
They even have other customer-service oriented niceties, such as the fact that you don't have to put your groceries on a belt at checkout -- instead their carts are designed so that the cashier pulls directly from the cart, they go into bags that then get put into another cart for you to take out of the store. Little things like that make me wonder why these concepts haven't caught on. (Same with Aldi's letting their cashiers sit on a stool -- employee friendly, and doesn't interfere with the customer).
Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)
I think the core observation behind the job of the spreadsheet guys is that, at scale, the choices within a family of products will approximate a normal distribution - so there will be a "best product" within each family; with a limited shelf space and a lot of different products to sell, this gives them a clear way to optimize for maximum revenue.
As a trivial example, just looking at the profitability of individual items would lead them to discontinue selling milk (I mean, there's no profit in it so why bother?) because it's generally used as a loss leader.
- Sent from my Xperia Compact
well. I'm a nokia 5.3 owner now. It's big, but ticks all the other boxes & is cheap...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format_war
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_obsolete_technology
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fad
and so on, I fail to see a reason for some of those failures. Seems arbitrary/random to me.
I just thought it was crappy that Motorola was actually providing phones with the features people were asking for (In the Droid days, people wanted physical keyboards, and the Droid Turbo offered insane battery life and a damn near bullet-proof screen), but they seemed to be commercial failures.
FWIW, I use a Pixel 3 now, which seems to be doing okay, but still not near the success of iPhone and Galaxy.
I don't really follow this line of thinking.
Of course, knowing the real reason is preferable, but not always possible, especially in a premodern setting. Before the discovery of prions nobody really knew why cannibalism is dangerous, yet it was a taboo in most of the civilized world.
Samsung learned from the industry represented here and it’s disconcerting to observe the lack of self-awareness in the vitriol being leveled at them from here. Equally disconcerting is that the same people rending their clothes over this probably overlook their Gmail messages being scanned and ads in their inbox, but a television, mein gott, a bridge too far.
This is your world, HN. We all live in it now. Sucks, no?
If their $300 bargain basement basement tv was ads supported to keep the price low, eeh, maybe.
But that isn't the case here.
Consumer Gmail is free. If Office 365 premium ever starts showing ads, people will also become upset.
And Microsoft will do nothing about it because people will use it anyways.
Not everyone on HN works in adtech, and very likely none of the people in this thread do either.
Or to put it another way, they are implementing communism by other means, with the same bad outcomes for the masses.
What difference is "Strategische Konzernentwicklung/corporate development/group development" to a Soviet 5-year plan, aggravated by quarterly reviews and HFT?
Gennadiy Gosplanovich would approve with a hysteric laugh.
I know. Been in several of them. Fortunately got out :)
edit: Of course you could call me a stoned hippie leftover from the 70ies, but that really was before my time. I'd counter that with management is on coke, crack or other medications which influence empathy in a bad way. Simple as that.
(Now playing "Ka-Ching!" with a pitchfork on the karmic harp)
