This is accurate, but the sense I get is that there's a deliberate effort to move from licensed IP to Lego-created brands.
E.g. there are vastly more "Friends" kits, the Lego house brand targeted at girls, than Disney princesses.
Ninjago has become a perennial answer to the sword fighting action that Star Wars only delivers intermittently.
Lego's new "Hidden Side" brand seems clearly targeted at being a Lego-owned alternative to Harry Potter with alternative schools, trains, buses, etc.
I also get the sense that the 3rd party licenses are actually more focused towards the "Adult Fan of Lego/AFOL" community, e.g. the $200 Stranger Things kit, the $399 Disney Castle, and the $799 Millenium Falcon seem priced well above even what generous parents will spend on birthday/holiday gifts.
It would be interesting to see the sales breakdown between in-house and licensed brands and how it's shifting over time.
As the parent of a Lego-consuming youngster I have to agree - but it's also interesting to watch Lego try to create lines that fail to thrive (compare Chima to Ninjago, both started at about the same time, only one remains...) Partly that seems to be about story-telling, maybe ninjas just easier to work with.
Lego Ninjago cartoon is actually quite good. Its on season 9 if i am not mistaken and the movie was pretty good too. Considering its an own brand - it's doing well.
This sentiment drifts dangerously close to a conspiracy theory.
The existence of the vaccine industry demonstrates there is a market for a cure. As do immunotherapies. Where cures are possible, they are commercialized.
Honestly can you explain to me, as an outsider, why this particular theory is a conspiracy and "embarrassing" to even consider, compared to all the other ridiculous shit going around healthcare in the US?
It wouldn't surprise me one tiny bit, given the US' track record with letting corporations do whatever the hell they want to, to people.
I'm not saying it's true, but you can't simply dismiss a theory about the corporate world screwing over the American people with a simple "no way that's too ridiculous to ever happen", any more. Especially if it's directly in line with what the free market would demand, as well as it not happening being contingent on a corporation being "nice" from the good of its "heart".
Please tell me instead that it's false because there is regulation in place, or there is some strong market force making them take the other route.
Because your implied argument would be "that is inhumane and corporations wouldn't do that"--now THAT is embarrassing.
So? Corporations, governments and other people conspire to rip off customers all the time.
Off the top of my head: Planned obsolescence is a thing. Whole companies of people in India calling your house trying to trick you into buying computer-virus protection is a thing. Entire nations conspiring to steal industry secrets from other countries is a thing. Operation Mockingbird was/is a thing. General corruption is a thing and people working together when they have common goals is a thing.
So what's your point in saying that something sounds like a "conspiracy theory" when there are clearly many, many people conspiring to do wrong all the time?
And the existence of the vaccine industry does not prove that cures are always commercialized when possible.
> And the existence of the vaccine industry does not prove that cures are always commercialized when possible.
For once, the health industry works on planning its own obsolescence (as it should, generally), and a major conspiracy theory pops up countering the trend...
Another domain you didn't mention: imagine the crisis in the food and distribution industry if everyone started having a healthy diet overnight... While those sectors may not have started the obesity epidemics deliberately, they now rely on its expansion for growth.
Selling a vaccine for a disease to virtually every person alive can make more money than selling drugs to treat a disease to the few people that actually get that disease.
No it can't. There is crap money in vaccines and they are hard to make. You can literally just open up Glaxo, Sanofi, et al annual reports and confirm this.
To not be glib: first, Prevnar is an outlier (https://www.fiercepharma.com/special-report/5-prevnar-13) and lack of profitability in basic vaccines is a public health problem in terms of investment in R&D and producer concentration https://magazine.jhsph.edu/2002/fall/vaccines.html (dated link but still accurate). They aren't like normal pharma in terms of their margins and R&D profile. You develops something for macular degeneration and it's a one off that can be depreciated. Influenza and some others require international monitoring, forecasting, sample collection and new work every season. It's closer to biologics or genetic therapies in terms of cost of revenue, but priced nowhere near that because of the economies of scale and, frankly, social responsibility of the producers.
It's definitely a different market than drugs with it's own set of challenges, but I'd say the lack of profitability has more to do with the disease state the vaccine is for versus the fact it's a vaccine.
And the global vaccine market is work $32B right now, so there is obviously a lot of profit being made.[1]
Look, I get your point on disease state and I don't think companies are doing it for charity. But I don't think it's helpful to drop revenue figures absent margins. And it would be interest to see comparative global profits broken down along lines like Prevnar/Gardasil vs dtap/mmr. Nothing against the former, but when I consider deaths from preventable diseases like the latter it's kind of staggering the value we get for the money. $32B is the market cap of twitter.
I'm not conflating them, I'm using it to put it in perspective. It's common rhetorically and I assume the HN audience is smart enough to understand that.
United Health Care, one of the largest private insurers in the US covers more lives than the Canadian Government and has every incentive to negotiate low prices.
This simple answer is satisfying to many who otherwise prefer single-payer plans, but doesn't really hold up to scrutiny
Health insurers in most states are subject to a minimum loss ratio that says they must payout 85% of the premiums they take in. Insurers operating near this cap actually have an incentive to pay out more money in order to raise the cap on their profits.
Then competing insurers can steal their insureds away with lower premiums. The caveat is that we must abolish employer sponsored healthcare, dump everyone on healthcare.gov, and provide a sufficient pool of healthy lives to make providing insurance viable.
I don't think that can explain it, because IIRC that rule has only been around since Obamacare, but the US/world price disparity for prescription drugs has existed much longer than that.
> This simple answer is satisfying to many who otherwise prefer single-payer plans, but doesn't really hold up to scrutiny
I mean, it fails the even more basic scrutiny that Canada simply does not have a single payer for pharmaceuticals, or even a handful of single payer provinces. It's much like the US in structure (out of pocket or private insurance), simply with price controls.
Well, if UHC decides to negotiate hard and fails, then people will leave UHC and move to another insurer which is willing to pay those insane prices.
If country X (with single payer plans) does the same thing, the only choice the pharmaceutical company has is to not be covered by insurance, which mean they won't sell their drug.
Also the state can just pass laws to make the pharmaceutical company life's miserable. UHC can't do that.
1) The founder makes the case that if they reach a critical mass of "X users," or "Y Transaction volume," or another relevant metric there will be a windfall to be shared.
2) The investor evaluates the viability of the plan based on macro factors and the track record of the founders.
Every startup pitch has a certain amount of uncertainty. In this case, the market for a Patreon-like service was well-understood. The risk in this deal was whether or not the team could actually execute. There's no definitive way to tell if a team will be able to execute or not until you invest.
It turns out that this team has a strong pedigree in community-building, but perhaps less in the day-to-day operation of a market place in a market with an entrenched competitor. They also seemed to be focused as much on achieving ideological milestones as financial ones (which is fine!).
The outcome is unfortunate, but that doesn't mean the bet was bad when it was made.
That seems like the weakest part of the argument — Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens, Costco, and every other major retailer has a similar program.
All use sales data to determine what sells best and copy it. I did this for a decade, designing store brand medical devices for all the major retailers.
There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Amazon. The "private label" one is by far the weakest.
The difference between the other major retailers and Amazon is the search. When I go through a physical store I will see everything that they have up for sale and have the choice of buying everything - but on Amazon the sheer amount of products that are showing up in searches is the problem. Hard enough to compete against other vendors for the place on the first two search pages, it's unfair that Amazon gives their own brand an advantage.
With Amazon, I have the ability to list my product, and buy ads pointing people directly to it.
With physical retailers, I have to hope I can convince the retailer to stock it, often have to pay up front for shelf space, and then have to continue to pay co-op fees for advertising services of dubious value.
Moreover, with Amazon, I know exactly how many units have been sold at any time and have the ability, for a fee, to get feedback from the buyers. With retail, you only get a rough estimate of sales, usually lagging by a quarter, and have no easy way to survey buyers.
I'm not saying that Amazon is acting like a great corporate citizen, but having worked with Amazon and most of the major national retailers, I'd take Amazon in a heartbeat.
As a consumer, I'd say search is Amazon's weakest link. It's often easier to find products on Amazon through Google or DuckDuckGo than through Amazon's own website. Product metadata is so poorly curated that Amazon's filters are pretty useless; compare sometime to specialist retailers like Microcenter or NewEgg where curation is much more complete. I often search for the combination of features I want on other sites and then look for the same exact product number on Amazon to check for a better deal (and Amazon isn't always the cheapest).
Funny you mention that. Because my experience is different: I often have to wade through shady marketplace offers with hundreds of fake reviews and paid ads. I have to dig deeper or explicitly search for AmazonBasics products to even find the USB cables or tablet stands from Amazon itself.
It might be that personalization is in effect here (or some sort criteria), but I sometimes would like to better filter marketplace offers I don't even trust.
Plenty of physical stores do that too - place their brand at eye height, in more places, featured in their ads, etc.
Amazon controls a large but minority of pretty much any market their in, until you start making smaller and smaller market definitions to the point of being ludicrous. As such, not being a monopoly, they're perfectly fine to do all this they want.
Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens and Costco are not marketplaces, they're retailers, and they have contracts with suppliers and pay distributors to purchase goods to resell to consumers. Amazon is a marketplace where any retailer can list their goods for sale.
I believe Warren's argument is that Amazon is abusing their position as the marketplace platform owner by listing their own goods at prices that undercut marketplace retailers.
So your argument is that a marketplace is a place where it is easier for a third-party to get their goods sold than a retailer? And the distinction is how a supplier gets their product in is the differentiator?
And then the argument is that the marketplace (where it is easier to get listed) should be regulated more than the retailer (which often uses control over sales to push prices up)?
The argument is that retailers take on risk by agreeing to sell a product since they purchase the product upfront. A marketplace like Amazon is different because they can take on 0 risk while still collecting all the data about what's selling and then turn around and undercut the vendor with an Amazon Basics product risk free.
First, I think large retailers like Walmart can reduce or even eliminate the risk of selling a product in their contracts with product producers, making it effectively like selling on consignment.
How profitable is Amazon Basics anyway? I bet it's small numbers. If dropping it was enough to get regulators to go away, I bet Amazon would drop it in a heartbeat. Other aspects like Prime and AWS are worth fighting over, both in terms of their value to the company and their potential to harm markets.
I bet Amazon does pretty good business with "Basics". It is a really interesting concept, IMO, and really different from store brands in the past.
In many cases, the Amazon Basics products compete with essentially brandless (or relatively unknown brand) importers. The Amazon Basics brand works in these cases by having significantly more credibility than (insert random name here) USB cables.
Its really the opposite way that store brand products have worked with traditional products in B&M stores, where the branded product generally has a higher natural reputation.
The practical difference between selling a few items in a few test stores vs offering a marketplace is zero. The storespace is a much bigger limiting factor than the perceived difference between a "marketplace" and a "retailer", IMO.
So you think it should be illegal for Walmart, Kroger, Walgreens and Costco to allow a company to rent shelf space, and allow that other company to keep the capital on its books until its sold, and to allow the retailer to act as a payment processor?
Whos books the capital sits on while its in a warehouse is absolutely the most arbitrary distinction in all of this. Amazon provides warehouse space, and the product provider takes the risk of unsold product. Its a fair trade that allows exposure companies wouldnt otherwise get, unless they convinced amazon to BUY their stock.
If anything is anti competitive, its walmart/apple etc forcing companies to drastically ramp up production, and then leaving them high and dry unless they accept low ball offers. It's exactly what Apple did to GT Advanced Technologies (forced a furnace company to turn into a manufacturing company, a deal they "couldnt refuse", and when they backed out / failed to deliver the company ended up ~90% smaller.)
Amazon sells all products, Walmart only sells some. Amazon sells online, Walmart sells in retail and online.
So Amazon might preference another product, while Walmart both preferences other products and doesn't even accept most. Walmart preferences other products online as well.
Yet Amazon is a monopoly? So if Amazon greatly restricted their product offering, they are good to go?
You asked the difference between a marketplace and a retail store. Being a marketplace alone does not incur regulation. Being a dominant marketplace which takes anti-competitive stances is problematic, and taking action against anti-competitive moves by the most dominant marketplace in the US is what's being debated here.
I'm not certain why we seem to be debating the merits of Walmart versus Amazon. I would be willing to venture that Warren supports regulations and potential antitrust action against Walmart, too. Just because she's proposed antitrust action on one type of organization doesn't mean she won't also support another - indeed, she wants the same of many organizations on Wall Street, and previously sponsored legislation to regulate Walmart to prevent poor labor practices [0].
> Being a dominant marketplace which takes anti-competitive stances is problematic.
Totally agree. The reason I bring up Wal Mart is to illustrate how this is essentially click-bait legislation.
Wal Mart tore through main street providing retail space for products they liked, also making their own versions and selling for much cheaper, preferencing products, etc. Dominating the marketplace and forcing businesses to close. We called that good capitalism. To my knowledge, Warren has not submitted or voted on a bill in her tenure to break up Wal Mart.
However now we are presenting Amazon as a unique type of problem and asking to break it up. With the one chief difference being the perception of fairness in presenting products equally because you can upload the listings yourself and it's on the internet.
I'm just trying to figure out why these relatively young, trendy companies, instead of a whole host of other monopolies that are far more important.
If the legislation comes down to semantics around an internet "marketplace" vs a retail store, then that begs another question of whether or not that is actually fair, and what the functional difference between the two actually is.
This is an important point. There's nothing to stop Harvard or Stanford from commercializing their research directly. They have massive endowments of financial and human capital.
The flip critique of the drug industry is to suggest they're basically taking miracle cures developed in toto in publicly-funded labs and taking pure profits.
If that were the case, shouldn't one of the dozens of well-capitalized research institutions just go to market?
The reality is the drug companies take on a tremendous burden turning high-level research into a product that works, including:
+ Formulating a product that will work at scale,
+ In widely diverse populations,
+ While eliminating potential side effects,
+ Adapting for human UX limitations,
+ Exhaustively guarding against adverse reactions,
+ At the same time, building production capacity,
+ Creates marketing materials for patients, but also to educate doctors who don't have scads of time to study new treatments,
+ Physically distributing the product
+ Monitoring the product fastidiously once it's on the market for negative reactions,
+ Sending humans to almost every doctor's office to answer any questions about the product,
+ While staffing a 24/7 customer service number to sort out any problems
I love Reddit and have no problem with this move in principle, though I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent."
I'm not a big believer in crypto, but Reddit seems like one of the few platforms that would allow a crypto economy to develop and provide an alternative to the dominant money-making models.
> I do wish there was at least one social platform that would try to follow the Craigslist ethos and stay "proudly independent."
I worked at reddit for 4 years, but quit in 2016, largely because they were clearly beginning to switch from a small, fairly independent company (despite being owned by Advance/Conde) to one that was going to become completely dependent on venture capital and I knew what that would end up doing to the site.
It's in private alpha and is still fairly small, but it gets several hundred posts/comments a day and is progressing steadily. If you (or anyone else) is interested in an invite, send me an email at the address listed in the blog post and I'll be happy to give you one.
This sounds exactly like the kind of Reddit alternative we need. Most competitors right now seem to think Reddit's biggest problem is their policy against user harassment and hate speech (even though this is barely enforced at all).
Just based on your blog post, you seem really in tune with what the real problems with Reddit (and social media as a whole) are in 2019.
It looks interesting. Your blog says it has "Limited tolerance, especially for assholes." I'd like to ask you a question that would help elucidate this ethos. Let's say a user makes a comment about how illegal immigrants should be deported, and another user calls the first racist in response. How would the site respond & why?
It's impossible to answer questions like that. Depending on a lot of factors, the response could be anything from "do absolutely nothing" to "ban both users".
Community management and moderation aren't simple, black-and-white decisions. Anyone that claims they are has never been involved in doing it at a meaningful level.
This is actually exactly the response I was hoping for. Any community that responds in a black-or-white manner on a cultural issue like this one would be completely incapable of supplanting a global site like Reddit.
Love what I've read so far and have sent an invite request. Thank you for your work, I was beginning to lament that all social media would fall into the toxic shitpost aggregator turned VC cash machine role.
Do you have any screenshots of what the website looks like? I'm curious. I'm not asking you to make them just for me, I want to know if they already exist. If they don't and you don't want to make them, that's fine.
The irony of that comic is that reddit had more traffic than Digg when Digg died. The "mass influx" from Digg to reddit wasn't all that massive, because most of those people were already reddit users too.
About 5 years ago, Reddit hired a crypto guy, Ryan X Charles, to make something called "reddit notes"[0] that they could never explain[1]. He wasted his time re-implementing bitcoin in Javascript[2], and was eventually fired.[3]
I guess you could say they were already early pioneers of the "cryptocurrency scam flameout" pattern.
That would require Bitcoin to be free from economic/political interference first, and given the the block size debacle and concentration of power with the Chinese miners, that's not the case.
(on the crypto note) is something like https://steemit.com/ what you are envisioning?
It does seem like we are stuck in a cycle where we are super into platforms until they become large and too beholden to investors, then we swap. Some kind of truly community driven (open source) federated service does seem like a real answer to this problem. Maybe we will all end up on Mastodon-like services pretty soon.
Apple never co-locates with a Dollar Tree store. There's a point at which Apple and other high-end retailers will decide that their brands are being diminished by being located next to an Alpaca-based clothing store. This may create a death spiral that accelerates the demise of the mall.
The NH malls across the border from Massachusetts are a somewhat unique situation. I'm not really familiar with the mall the author is writing about but the other one across the border is definitely lowish end by Apple standards. However, because lots of people cross the border to save on sales taxes, it makes sense Apple would be there--and is one of the busier stores in the whole mall.
Is that because Apple doesn't want to be tainted by that brand...or because there's minimal overlap in customer bases?
If Dollar Trees are bringing in the money and the customers, then either Apple DOESN'T belong there, or they'll start to share customers. Either way, I think the "banality" of the brand is at best an inefficient way to look at it and at worst a misleading one.
Author here. My point is that if a mall that is by all accounts one of the success stories can only fill space with low-quality retailers, maybe the situation is more dire than we're being led to believe. I live in that area and was shocked to see how many storefronts had suddenly gone low-rent. But YMMV.
I was surprised to see you didn’t mention the ubiquitous cell phone repair kiosks in every mall. I co-own a chain of cell phone repair stores, and although we don’t have any mall locations, the people in our industry who do have mall locations generally do well with them.
These small services type of businesses are able to pay larger rent and are more stable clients than the “boxes of clothes or accessories from China” types of stores. And since phone repair is an in-person service, it’s less likely to be hurt by online retailers.
I believe more malls will move toward service businesses. One here in Austin allowed a giant trampoline park in what used to be a flagship store. The store is packed with kids and parents.
I’m very interested in this area and how it will continue to play out!
It's a great point! I'm always skeptical of the "move to experiences" narrative, but it sounds like you're having success there! I think that's definitely one route to go. I'm mostly curious about how Simon and similar companies are viewing this landscape? Are they planning on managing these malls indefinitely? Or do they largely view them as depreciating assets that they'll milk until they are demolished?
This was my take away as well. "Shame" in this case is defined as independent retailers with "low quality goods." In this case, it appears that "low quality" is synonymous with anything not Mainstream Luxury.
Beyond that, this is the reality of how modern mall development works. Mall properties are basically ephemeral pump and dump real estate schemes. When the anchors move out to the latest highly subsidized mall with bigger and better TI incentives, little guys move in. Some of them are garbage, but many are not. Sometimes the mall makes it, sometimes it doesn't. Nothing new or special here.
Fair enough. From my perspective I'd say the mall is a success story _because_ it can still fill storefronts with independent operators. Is that a sign of impending doom? Maybe, or a sign of a transformation in progress, and I give you credit for perceiving that change as it's happening.
I'm much more familiar with the other NH mall in Nashua (Pheasant Lane). I guess I would have said that it, at least, has long been midrange at best--not that I've made a study of it. It does have an Apple Store which is something of an outlier for the mall as a whole but, as you allude to, Salem and Nashua are both somewhat unusual because of the sales tax situation.
I was at the Pheasant Lane Mall the weekend it opened! You are 100% right, it's decidedly middle-brow, compared to something like the Copley Mall in Boston.
E.g. there are vastly more "Friends" kits, the Lego house brand targeted at girls, than Disney princesses.
Ninjago has become a perennial answer to the sword fighting action that Star Wars only delivers intermittently.
Lego's new "Hidden Side" brand seems clearly targeted at being a Lego-owned alternative to Harry Potter with alternative schools, trains, buses, etc.
I also get the sense that the 3rd party licenses are actually more focused towards the "Adult Fan of Lego/AFOL" community, e.g. the $200 Stranger Things kit, the $399 Disney Castle, and the $799 Millenium Falcon seem priced well above even what generous parents will spend on birthday/holiday gifts.
It would be interesting to see the sales breakdown between in-house and licensed brands and how it's shifting over time.