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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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No, not on price, on orginality. On the stories you can tell about the creation of your product. If everything around you gets automated, created by AI, copied by big corpos and soulless copycats you will have the choice: Cheap and uninteresting or maybe a bit more expensive but with a personal connection. It's your decision to choose.
Do you actually care that much about the creative story behind the latest widget that was added to your new appliance? Are you going to be choosing the 30% more expensive option every time because of that concern.
We aren't talking about art here, very few people give a shit about getting a "personal connection" with their new toaster. We're talking about buy use forget consumer goods. And if someone else is selling the same quality and the same features at a lower price, that's the one that your average Joe will buy. And will keep buying until you can't afford to keep making and selling yours because you can't compete on the metrics that people care about most.
Yeah look at how every single conversation about supporting small businesses went on reddit. Users would rage day and night about the ills of megacorporations. But if you got them talking about supporting small business they'd come out of the woodwork to tell you they're not paying a higher price. And with things being as tight as they are right now, that's a logical conclusion. But it just goes to show that even if you sit someone down and explain to them that X thing they say they support absolutely cannot compete with the price of Y thing they say they hate - they will still side with their pocketbook 9/10 times
Exactly.
Everyone loves to support local independent small businesses when it's convenient. And some people even have the gumption to hold to those ideals when it's difficult. But the vast majority don't care most of the time.
When big business makes it cheaper and more convenient to buy from them, most people will. I'm just as guilty of that as anyone else. When money and time are plentiful I love supporting a local bakery for lunch and a local book store for that greeting card. But when I'm pressed for time or money is short, it's straight back to Walmart to get a card and an entire meal for the price of one baked snack from the local place. And in 10 minutes instead of half an hour.
And the megacorps don't need a majority market share to win. They don't even need a large enough market share to be profitable, they just need to make sure your market share is too small to survive. And once you fail, then they can change practices away from kill competition and back to make money.