What is the unique value proposition of selling honey?

Here in Australia, "free range" hens must be kept at no more that 10,000 head/hectare (or 1 sqm of land per hen). This is massively better than battery hens, which are kept at as low as... 0.03 sqm of cage/hen. The animal welfare benefits are huge, battery hens have a truly horrible existence, to the point where I believe that it is immoral to farm them in this way.

But some producers are advertising lower stocking densities, some 6 sqm per hen and others even 10 sqm. They are charging a small premium for their eggs, and some people pay it, because they like the idea of animals being treated well.

So yes, many people are prepared to pay a bit extra for ethical treatment of animals. Even people (if that where the original post was pointing at).

From my perspective, I looked at the business and realised that we were selling hardware at a 90% margin, but only eking out a 5% profit. Where was the rest of the money going? Well, obviously to a very inefficient rest of the company that included the software developers (me ;-) ). Later it was discovered that it was also being imbezzled, but we didn't know about it at that time...

It occurred to me, though, that the only thing that was stopping a company from eating our lunch was that telecom hardware was a capital intensive industry. So you had BNR, AT&T and Seimens capturing practically the entire market, each being as incompetent as the other, but with very little distinction between them. All you needed was a few billion dollars to shake the industry to the core. And, of course, that happened. It took only a couple of years (less than 5 I think) for Nortel to go from 100K employees to zero (with the executives slurping up the retirement fund to pay for their own "retention bonuses", because what would have happened if the executives bolted as soon as bankruptcy proceedings started??? I mean apart from retirees actually getting their retirement money, obviously...)

But it's a funny thing because if I were Barry, I would be selling mead. And I would open up a visitor centre in a "Ye Olde Merry England" vibe where you can sample the mead. And I would start an onsite bakery with Knights in Shining Armour theme where I would test out recipes on my customers. And I would make a joint venture with a factory producing confectionary to try to get into convenience stores. And because I would quickly run out of honey to sell, I would buy up all of Mark's honey and eventually just acquire him so that he's my employee. Then I'd fire him because he's mean to bees.

But realistically, I think Barry will just be trying to figure out how to siphon a few extra dollars out of the business and into his pocket because starting up new ventures are risky and hard work.

I live in Bellevue, WA. I would gladly pay 1.5x the normal rate for Uber in this area to get my rides from a company that (a) is sustainably profitable (b) treats its drivers ethically, e.g. hiring them as real employees, and (c) otherwise has the same rider experience as Uber and Lyft, e.g. booking through an app, average ETA under 10 minutes, automatic payment. Should I expect to pay more? If so, how much more? 2x? 5x? 10x?

If you sell honey, usually your goal isn't to monopolize the whole honey market. You just sell honey.

You might be nearer to some customers. You might be a bit friendlier, or have slightly better marketing. Or people just buy from you because they are used to it.

Not every market is a winner-takes-all, and that's very good.

This translates to software as well. There are many markets that don't have one monopolist, and space for many players.

The natural, default position is to think everyone else thinks like you do. So if you present a solution to a problem, they should value it the same way you do. "I wrote this because I didn't want to do X". But it seems to turn out that most people don't care about your specific X.

My last, big attempt at FOSS didn't start that way. When I first started the project, it was the only such project available. But a household-name corp started their own, competing project a year later and all I was left with was (other than a much more complete implementation) some proselytizing about the open web. But none of it could compete with them funding developers out of pocket--while I scraped together contact jobs--to go out and implement their library for other people's projects, write more blog posts than I have hours in a day, and generally just fill the space with "look at us, we're the only dog in town" fake news.

I knew their project was nowhere near as complete or easy to use as mine. But I never put the time into expressing that. Well, for one thing they were playing the "we're all one, big, happy community of niche-industry devs" card, so it was impossible to say anything that could at all be considered negative towards them. But I had so much code to write, and code is a lot easier to me than marketing. It would have taken me becoming an expert in their project, when they had no such burden with regards to mine.

I let myself get pushed into taking about my project in terms of theirs. Hell, some people even accused me if "wasting time, reinventing the wheel" (to this day, no phrase pisses me off more).

Now, I'm just trying to write software for myself. That's all I was ever really doing. The FOSS stuff had no plan, it was just "here's some code, maybe other people will find it useful". While that is often the ur-myth of FOSS, if it were ever true, is just not how projects grow today.

The secret to our success was coloring it red, and giving it a "vampire theme" at the height of the Vampire show/movie craze and selling it through Hot Topic (a Fortune 500 retailer with our target demographic and we were selling through 800 stores nationwide).

As an aspiring beekeeper: Please no! I can't afford to pay 100.000 Bees! We can talk about an retirement plan though, as they all die working.

If Barry is able to communicate to the market that his honey operation is more ethical, then he can communicate other things to the market as well, irrespective of whether they have any substance or basis in product. Lots of brands of water out there, many different shapes and sizes of bottles. Barry's honey is differentiated, just not in terms of product.

Mark can continue treating his bees badly, or he can try to discredit Barry, or he can try to differentiate his product in some way (planting health-giving plants whose pollen they can deposit into their honey).

The post imagines only one assumption being relaxed: that of ethical sourcing and the ability to communicate that fact. But in relaxing those assumptions, it is natural to relax others: the power of marketing being foremost. This is a complex system and you cannot change a single variable, or imagine that Mark simply takes Barry's moralistic grandstanding lying down.

The current "common knowledge" is that if they don't profile people, they can't be efficient. That's very wrong. There are many ways to deliver ads to people that might be interested in them without profiling individuals. But the market is too inert, and people too hooked to FB and Google already.

Positioning is always going to be at the very least a soft-moat and especially in consumable goods it's going to be a pretty strong moat (think Coke vs. Pepsi).

It's the most common revealed preference. People do exist who care about these things but it's rare. The ideal situation is you give people the ability to pretend caring but actually continue exploitation.

Except if companies are fighting to treat employees better, then everybody wins because conditions get better.

(Yes, I understand this was allegory, but I took it literally.)

From my experience, analogies usually are a mechanism of manipulation, trying to drag in some arguments which bare facts cannot support.

Then customers are splitted based on which ethical axis is more important to them and internalized that decision. Now both Barry and Mark can increase their profit margin as customers would not switch to the other 'evil one'.

That means that while Alice can come along and be less evil than Barry and Mark, Eve can appear to be less evil than all of them and corner the market.

Now ask yourself which our society optimizes for: designing and implementing sustainable, ethical business models? Or designing and implementing sophisticated public relations campaigns?

Btw-- how much market share does Firefox currently have?

Tech has exactly the same problem.

Sometimes, people enjoy the lifestyle of their work and provide a product/service that people want/need/will love pay for. Their business may not be unique, they may not offer optimal prices. Sure, these folks can very likely be undercut because it's unlikely that by these goals alone they're running an optimal process to reduce costs or have the capital to scale things up to points they can attain cost saving advantages. This means their value proposition would be fairly weak.

That's fine. People still want honey and maybe they like Mark or Barry or whomever and would rather pay a little bit extra to make sure their local bee keeper is able eat and continue to contribute to their community.

One unique value proposition does come to mind however for many of these local artisan style businesses: these people are less likely to abandon small communities. Pure businesses focused on profit motives alone will leave when the situation become unprofitable. People like Mike and Barry are more likely to stay as long as their lifestyle can be maintained. They may even have children who want to continue the family business as is (or not).

There are plenty of examples where Walmart, for example, saw opportunities in small rural communities, swept in, undercut the competition and then for one reason or another found it would be best to close the store leaving a vacuum of needs to be met: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/when-wal-mart-leaves-small...

Sometimes the local businesses can rebound but often those local vendors aren't interested in being burned twice.

Life is not always about offering the best value proposition. Constantly worrying about optimization in every aspect of life will make you pretty miserable (at least from my experience). At some point you have to choose happy over optimal and understand that's a respectable goal.

The literal answer is probably found in the law of comparative advantage -- both Barry and Mark should do what they're best at doing. (Arguably this law is one of the handful of non-obvious insights from the science <sic> of economics.)

A lot of markets are extremely price sensitive, but, OTOH, there seems to be a growing ratio of informed consumers that are not racing to the bottom, but instead acknowledge that a) almost every action has an ethical component that can / should be factored in, and b) how you spend your money has a greater impact than how you cast your 3-5 yearly vote.

I always ask to be 1099 labor, and I'm always told "absolutely not. It'll never happen; completely unacceptable".

Where does this delusion come from that W2 status is a good thing that workers want to have and employers want to withhold? Where are these W2-withholding employers?

You can't be arbitrarily "good" to your employees, though. You have to improve your business to be able to afford to be better to your employees.

That's as it should be.