German scientists recently published interesting data: over the past 50 years, Germans have become on average 400% richer, and the number of unhappy people suffering from depression has grown by 38%.
Henry Ford became one of the richest men in the world thanks to the reformation of the automobile industry. His successes have inspired many talented entrepreneurs to create the greatest brands: Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick (Buick), Dodge (Dodge). New cars literally flooded America. After a while, the moment came when car sales plummeted. The market is saturated.
And really, why would anyone need a new car if the old one drives great? Why waste your money? Faced with a sales problem, ingenious marketers came up with an ingenious new solution: they began to instill a sense of inferiority in the owner of old cars.
Car manufacturers began to release more and more new models every year. Their success inspired entrepreneurs in other industries: clothing, cosmetics, footwear, and the soul rushed to heaven … more precisely, to hell.
It is often seen with what contempt silly, fashionably dressed teenagers look at a child who cannot afford such a luxury. Please note that 2 times a year, clothing manufacturers release new collections. Experts and designers endlessly repeat to us: "this season the green color will be fashionable." Why is this done? This trick is designed to increase sales. People who bought the exact same clothes, but in red last year, will feel uncomfortable.
Transnational corporations manipulate the minds of the simple-minded consumer, constantly releasing new devices, clothes, etc. They spend $ 500 billion a year on advertising. This money is enough to make humanity miserable. This is a huge amount of money! To solve the problem of hunger on Earth, only $ 50 billion must be spent per year.
The main problem is not that we constantly have to throw away good things because they are out of fashion. The tragedy of humanity is unjustified expectations. Having bought a new car, a person is happy for a very short time. If the next day his friends buy cooler cars than his, this joy will be limited to just one day. Many of us are more striving for new fashionable things and, without noticing it, become unhappy. The rat race turns the life of people who have succumbed to the trend of fashion into a continuous hell, into absolute nonsense.
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What are we paying for? Or a market economy in practice
According to popular legend, a free market economy ensures the production of inexpensive and quality goods. In the fictional world of liberal economic fantasies, it happens as follows.
1. Each type of product is produced by several firms, while firms compete with each other.
2. Buyers choose the products that best meet the price-performance criteria.
3. Firms that make expensive and low-quality goods go bankrupt: no one buys anything from them.
4. Firms that make cheap and quality goods get a lot of customers and increase production.
5. The state ensures that competition is fair: that there are no collusions, no monopolies, no collisions on the market.
Nice scheme? Beautiful. In theory. In practice, for some reason, we do not observe cheap and high-quality goods: even in those areas where competition is very high.
Three basic examples: water, salt, potatoes
A brick of Soviet-style table salt in a cardboard box costs 20 rubles. The wholesale price of first-grinding salt is 3.6 rubles per kilogram. The cost of packing is a penny. It would seem that a super-profitable business - do it for 10 rubles, sell, say, for 15, cheaper everyone … But no, even for 20 rubles, you still have to look for salt.”On the shelves there is usually salt in expensive packages, which can be sold for 50 rubles.
Water is extremely cheap. The cost price of a 0.5 liter bottle of water is no more than three rubles. This includes a nice plastic bottle, cap and label.
At the same time, in stores this bottle of water costs 40 rubles, and at gas stations - already under a hundred, several times more expensive than gasoline. Needless to say, the water in these bottles is completely ordinary, without any tears of virgins and pollen from Madagascar dragonflies.
Potato. The purchase price for potatoes is several rubles per kilogram. We were not so long ago in Astrakhan, learned everything from the farmers personally. Closer to St. Petersburg (and closer to January), potatoes rise in price to 12-16 rubles per kilogram. This price usually already includes delivery to the store.
In the supermarket, potatoes are at least 30 rubles, while the price of 50-60 rubles per kilo also surprises no one.
Question. If we have the invisible hand of the market, if we have competition, where do these insane cheats come from? Maybe unloading potatoes is incredibly difficult?
No, one stacker can put on the counter several tons of goods per day, more than 100 tons of goods per month without much strain. In supermarkets, all processes are fine-tuned: brought it on a full cart, took away an empty cart … It's a quick and simple matter. We get the cost of unloading and unloading no more than 1 ruble per kilogram of potatoes: this is taking into account salary taxes and other unobvious expenses.
It would seem: we buy high-quality potatoes for 16 rubles, sell for 25 rubles, all the neighboring buyers are ours. Competitors - and in retail the competition is very strong - in the span … But no, no one does that. They sell medium-quality potatoes for 30 rubles and good ones for 50-60. Why?
Let me ask you another leading question. As you know, queues are formed regularly at checkouts in supermarkets. As you know, now a lot of buyers have mobile phones. As you know, retail chains spend a lot of money on researching the psychology of buyers and their needs.
So that's it. Why, then, supermarkets, which are not lazy to spray luring aromas on us and play relaxing music for us, cannot think of organizing free Wi-Fi around the checkout so that queuing is not so dreary?
The correct answer: because their task is not to do us well, but to knock the money out of us. Buyers make their choice not according to the criterion of "price-quality", as liberal economists try to convince us, but according to completely different criteria. Dirty carts, obscenely unkempt toilets, unsanitary warehouses and shelves, expired low-quality grub that sells at exorbitant prices - this is a completely typical picture for a random hypermarket.
And this is by no means some kind of phenomenon in a single city or region. Alas, the invisible hand of the market makes the stores behave in the most bestial manner.
A banal consideration. Suppose that in some magical land, buyers really choose products based on price / quality ratio. Let's say there is tough competition between the producers of goods, and every ruble matters. Question. Where will manufacturers get money for advertising in such a situation?
There are two products. The firm "Abyrvalg" sells good, high-quality shoes for 1000 rubles. Firm "Booster" sells shoes of exactly the same good quality, but already for 1500 rubles. The company "Booster" spends an additional 500 rubles on advertising its shoes.
Let me remind you that in our magical land, buyers choose according to the price-quality ratio. The question is: what kind of fool would buy expensive shoes "with advertising" in this situation, if you can buy exactly the same shoes, but without advertising and cheaper? A company that spends money on advertising will simply go broke!
In real life, as you know, the situation is reversed. A product without advertising has quite a few chances, and the most successful firms invest in advertising simply incredible amounts.
Smoothly getting to the point. Liberal economists are partly right. Intense competition and uncompromising struggle for the buyer really exist in nature. But the retail buyer in this situation is assigned the role of not a picky judge, but a dumb cattle, a kind of prize for which the players are fighting.
It is a big mistake to think that buyers choose based on price-quality ratio, or that buyers choose anything at all. Marketers make the choice for buyers. If the buyer is not satisfied with the assortment of expensive and bad goods offered to him, these are his problems: stores that sell inexpensive and high-quality goods have no chance of breaking into the market.
Another example familiar to everyone. Inkjet printers. Liberal economic logic dictates that the competition should be won by the firm that will make printers with cheap all-purpose inks. In practice, the market is dominated by manufacturers, each of which not only produces a senseless zoo of incompatible models, but also sells ink at exorbitant prices.
By the way, did you know that one of the most expensive liquids on earth is inkjet ink? There is no physical reason for setting such a price: this is pure marketing.
The real market economy - that economy, the pressure of which we feel on our own skin every day - is arranged quite simply. In order to sell your product, you don't have to pore over blueprints and make the best product in the world. You just need to buy buyers.
Customers are sold in special stalls, also known as "malls", "hypermarkets" and so on: therefore, in order to reach a customer, you need to arrange your goods in these shopping centers. That being said, it's usually not enough for you to just decorate your trap nicely. You also need to pay additionally for massive advertising, with the help of which the brains of potential buyers will be sharpened to purchase your product.
Suppose we are making some kind of stomach liquid called Toxy-Cola. In order for our product to be sold, we need to do the following:
1. Buy good places for "Toxy-Cola" on supermarket shelves.
2. Make an enticing packaging and correctly place bottles on these shelves.
3. Include powerful advertisements on TV and elsewhere.
Voila. If everything is done correctly, good sales are guaranteed
As for the quality and price … Indeed, in the twenty-first century it is ridiculous to remember this. Every ruble spent on quality is a ruble taken from the marketing and advertising department. Therefore, the quality of our drink will be as low as possible - if only customers could finish the bottle without much disgust. I don't even mention the harm to health: this characteristic is simply not important for sales.
Our drink will not be cheap either. We need to pay for shelf space and ads, remember? This is the main component of the price of a product, and there is no point in reducing it: less price - less advertising - less sales.
Thus, we get a natural result: in order to achieve success, the manufacturer is directly forced to sell an expensive and low-quality product.
Of course, there are a lot of nuances in this basic scheme. So, manufacturers of cars and other complex equipment are trying to incorporate obsolescence in their devices so that service centers can bring additional profit, and so that after two or three years of operation, the buyer needs to buy a new product.
Sometimes stale goods are sold at a price below cost, just to free the shelves. Since shelves are the main thing, discounts can easily go up to 100%. At such moments, lucky buyers get the opportunity to buy, although still low-quality goods, but at least at the price that could exist in the world of a normally working economy.
Often, there are holes in the production-sales chain that an experienced consumer can use to cheat the system a little and get a better and less expensive item than usual.
For organizations, the magic of marketing is much weaker, so organizations can buy some of the goods they need in normal quality and at a normal price.
However, in general, you and I are forced not only to put up with low-quality goods in inconvenient stores, but also to pay a huge "marketing" tax on every purchase, which, in fact, consists of most of the price of almost all consumer goods.