If people want to pay 10x for the fancy bottle and name they can but I don't think they lack the alternatives.
That's last-century thinking, from when manufacturing cost dominated. Today, it's all about building a monopoly and crushing any new entrants. Comcast. Apple. Google. Facebook. CVS. The US is down to four big banks.
It's exactly this century where you can buy anything at manufacturing cost from India or China if you want to, there's an entire political class upset about it.
I mean I'll give you Comcast, ISPs in the US in particular seem bad, but otherwise? Digital and electronic goods in particular have been driven down to the marginal cost of production, that's why 90% of the former are free.
The prelegeri really is retail capture.
Sorry, I’m having trouble tracking down this term. Could you tell me what it means or what it means in this context?
Possibly connected to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/praelego#Latin and the form praelegere to 'read before' in Latin, either the same kind of lecture/lesson sense, or about the parent comment "reading 'regulatory capture' before should really be 'retail capture'"?
I wanted to say "the problem is retail capture", but somehow it filled in a Romanian word instead... Phone keyboards...
Just for completeness, "prelegeri" would be best translated as "lectures" - it made no sense at all in context, it only happened to match a few letters of what I fat-fingered.
It works surprisingly well, but it does sometimes fail pretty spectacularly when you're sloppy and mis-type too many letters. It also can't help much when words are ambiguous (is that an English "in" or a mistyped Romanian "în"?). Still, it's generally a godsend for typing in mixed languages (say, like in Spanglish, where you'll write unas palabras en Ingles, y altras in Spanish). They even include things like names of local politicians or cities or brands.
Windows does seem to have this as well as an option ("Multilingual text suggestions"), but individual apps might not (e.g. I haven't seen it in Outlook).
Sure you can. If you're the dominant player, you can pay or buy out new entrants. Happens all the time in generic drugs.[1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/21/business/a-huge-overnight...
there are example employees I've seen that have this kind of leverage too
I work in the industry. It doesn’t happen all the time.
Two weeks ago I got a "9.5" (looks brand new, battery too) used Pixel 3a for 100$ on eBay. It's a perfectly fine phone with picture/video quality undersold by it's camera pixel count.
The specs are fine, the security isn't, and that's the problem.
https://www.helgilibrary.com/charts/what-country-has-the-mos....
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31384732
"Don't say the money is like magnetically charged. It's not the money is attracted to the north. It's the people, an asshole whose idea of invention is coming up with excuses, couldn't come up with shit if he cleaned up after his dog for once. Wants what is rightfully for innovators (creation of wealth that can scale, through thought that can be imprinted many times) and tries to corner a market. It always has a name, it's not an organic thing, there is always a guilty party. Not ISP's, Comcast. Not local banking, Wells Fargo. Not healthcare, Christus. Say it, corner the market. They're trying to corner the market. The markets have been cornered."
Comcast, Apple, Google, and Facebook are all who they are because they manufacture the thing they're selling for cheaper than anyone else can.
Whether that "thing" is last mile connectivity, iPhones, or segmented advertising eyeballs.
But Vitamin C in general is an extremely cheap compound. The costs are going to be in things like packaging, shipping, warehousing, shelf space, accounting for lost shipments and returns, and similar overhead. For simple products that overhead can be orders of magnitude more than the core product.