The Superversive - Quotha

Tee hee.

There is no big business for which this is not true. One of many reasons why the supposed laws of competition don't apply to big business.

Oh dear, here we go. Listen, mate, when Britain's four leading supermarket chains actually advertise themselves as having the same prices as each other, are you going to tell me that that is about fair competition? Now, a translator is supposed to keep confidential the stuff he was paid to translate, but as one very instructive translation I did was the very first I was paid for and is almost thirty years old, I think I can speak of it now. I translated a whole marketing report about the Italian chewing gum market for American corporation Wrigley's. The report ended by saying that the Italian market is dominated by a local company called Brooklyn's, and that while Wrigley's could well start a campaign to increase its then tiny share of the Italian market, that was not advisable, because Brooklyn's had a vast productive capacity and, if challenged in Italy, might take what the report called "unacceptable measures" in markets that Wrigley's then dominated, such as France. In other words, let them keep their near-monopoly in Italy and they will leave your near-monopoly in France alone. When I, being young and naive, made a comment on the matter to one of my clients, he remarked that that was the way big corporations did things - and to Hell with competition. That client, apart from being a personal friend (which was why he thought of me when he needed the report translated), was also a top manager in the company that had written the report, and a specialist in marketing who later became a university professor on the subject. He had previously been management level in UniLever and in a Fiat subsidiary, so he may have been said to know a few things about the way big corporations think and act.

Edited at 2012-04-17 06:38 pm (UTC)

I will say only a few things, and then be done and leave you the field. You seem to have missed two small points. First, the person who explained Wrigley's and Brooklyn's behaviour to me had worked at a high level for two giant corporations that did not concern themselves with chewing gum - UniLever (world's biggest food conglomerate) and Fiat (mechanics, cars, defence, engineering). That is where he got his view of what corporations will and will not do. Second, that was thirty years ago. I have had plenty of opportunity for observation on my own since, and it has confirmed what my old friend said. The primary concern of a big corporation is to endure; to keep its welter and sprawl of well-paid officers and directors intact, to continue to pump an even or (best hypothesis) slowly increasing stream of money from a more or less stable market. They will only grow if growth is not risky, and that is rarely the case. As for retail, the Big Four (Tesco's, Sainsbury's, Asda - that is Wal-Mart - and Morrison's) are actually rather more expensive than some foreign-owned chains - Lidl and Aldi's from Germany and Netto from Denmark - but, to my great surprise, their hold on the market is such that they have lost no market share to them at all, and in fact have driven Netto from the market altogether. That in spite of the fact that Aldi's, LIdl and Netto offered neither less choice nor less quality than the Big Four - and I know because I regularly shopped at all of them. You may call this conspiracy theory, if you insist; I call it experience. And why should the trade in books be such a terrible and disreputable exception to the heroic norm of all those valiantly competitive, above-board, highly principled corporations in other fields? But never mind. I am done and will not get back to this thread.

Every supermarket chain, every major retailer, employs people to shop the competition and check out their prices. If they find that they are being beaten on price on widely advertised goods, they have to match — because they really have nothing else to offer. One supermarket is about as good as another, and the products they sell are identical.

My sister's job is this, largely-- Target vs Walmart. Even has a scanner-gun that she has to at least pretend to hide. (It's a pretty friendly setup-- if a customer mistakes her for a worker of the other store, she'll help them, and in return the other store's people "don't recognize" her.)