InfiniteCompetition.com

Consumers today have almost infinite choices where to buy goods and services.

Customers in high volume ‘discount’ stores are no longer just those with low incomes.  Consumers with plenty of disposable income choose to shop at stores like Sams and Costco.

Millions of web sites like Amazon.com compete with brick and mortar stores for your business.

What has this done to margins?  Not surprisingly, margins on the actual goods and in many cases services too are tiny.  This is a great win for consumers and is what Capitalism is all about, bringing the best products for the lowest prices in an efficient competitive marketplace.

Smart retailers have found ways to add margin back however.  Best Buy is a great example.  So you buy that flat screen TV for a great price.  You’re psyched to go home and hook it up.  Oh wait, you need a new type of cable to connect it.  Hmm… it says $20 for a cheap one, $30 for a good one, and $50 for a supposedly great one with thick insulation, gold plating and some patented shielding.  Cables are one of the HIGHEST MARGIN ITEMS in Best Buy’s stores.  Their cost of goods is tiny, the margin is HUGE.  So they don’t mind the low margins on other items.  Same with batteries, ‘adapters’ (such as connecting an iPod to your car audio system), fashion cases for iPods and cell phones, and much more.  These impulse items are where the big profits are! Read the rest of this entry »

Infinite Competition, enabled by efficient communications, computers, and transportation, has brought many developing nations into the global marketplace that were not in it before.  Many of these nations have become, on a relative basis compared to earlier, fabulously wealthy.  Now all this ‘infinite money’ doesn’t just want to sit around, it wants to make more money, or rather the people whose money it is do!

Vast sums of ‘infinite money’ went seeking easy returns in the marketplace.  Much of it went to back global mortgage investments which were seen as relatively low risk with high return.  But, there was so much demand for this easy money that investment firms were running out of mortgages to ’sell’ as investments.  So they lowered the qualification bar for getting mortgages, to a ridiculous point where people could in essence borrow whatever they want with no qualifications.  And with all this easy money for borrowers, demand for homes skyrocketed, along with, no surprise, home prices.  And around and around it went.

This global pyramid scheme, like all others, was inevitably destined to collapse.

An excellent NPR (National Public Radio) audio stream about this can be found by clicking here and then click Full Episode on the left.

How many ways do you communicate? E-mail? Web forms? Blog? Paper? Instant messenger? Text messaging? Cell phone? Faxes? Postal service? POTS (plain old telephone system)? Advertising? These are just a few and you probably use most of them and more.

If we don’t yet have quite an infinite ways to communicate, we are moving toward an infinite number of channels among the ways and the quantities today are staggering between internet traffic, cell phone minutes and messaging, etc.

Besides all the ways you communicate, how MUCH are you communicating or at least trying to deal with?  Does a text message or IM or e-mail ever come at a bad time but you feel compelled to respond to it?  Do you get tons of bad jokes from friends and people you don’t know which you feel bad ignoring but you do anyway.  And then there’s spam.  One person’s treasure is another person’s spam!  Again the quantities are STAGGERING.

So what is infinite communication doing to us?  Leave a comment!  If you have time…

Traditional music publishers have held a tight grip on distribution, promotion, and deciding who will become popular!  The British television show Pop Idol, and now the American megahit American Idol, have turned this on its head, letting a potentially infinite number of ‘votes’ decide who will become popular, for whatever reason!  A stroke of genius by Simon Cowell and his associates.

Beyond American Idol bringing infinite competition to pop music, the distribution of music now has an infinite number of channels, with a huge number being illegal and unstoppable.  Otherwise law-abiding people think nothing of ‘burning a CD’ of someone else’s purchased CD, or downloading music from some questionable web site, often bringing viruses or worse onto their computers.

We now have infinite artists, with infinite distribution, to infinite consumers, and it is an infinite cacophony of sound!  And of course, video too…  Andy Warhol would be proud and smiling.

Welcome to InfiniteCompetition.com.  And so it begins…