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Comment by potato3732842 | Hacker News Reader

I really hate this projecting of the software gaming industry's behavior back into the "original" vices.

The casino, liquor store and drug dealer all make the same margin regardless of who they're selling to. If anything the problem users are more likely to cause problems for them so they'd rather make the money on casual users and scale.

Having your whole operation be basically a wash except for all the money from a few people with problems is fairly unique to digital gaming and the software industry.

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The top 10% of drinkers consume the majority of alcohol. Their average consumption is over 10 drinks per day, which I think clearly suggestions a problem. I think it's hard to imagine that losing >50% of revenue wouldn't matter to sellers.

Gambling is also very skewed. Studies place it something like 5% of in person gamblers accounting for 50% of profits or 1% for online gambling. I would guess for sports betting it's similar.

Of course it's not even really specific to vices, the top 10% of travelers take around 50% of flights, and you see similar effects in pretty much every area of consumption.

The issue is related to addiction.

People can’t get addicted to flying in the same manner as we have seen people get addicted to gambling or to some of these social media applications.

While it may be true that margins are independent of the buyer at a given scale, margins certainly do depend on scale. If 15% of the population is buying 75% of the alcohol (these are not ridiculous numbers), cutting that 15% out would put many alcohol producers (in particular those who sell cheap) out of business.

I don’t think it would put them out of business. Rather they would have to increase costs to stay in business.

Essentially a disturbing way to look at it is that the people with alcohol addiction are allowing everyone else to be able to consume alcohol for cheaper than it would otherwise be.

Same phenomena exist for other addictive things like sugar in soda and free to play video games. (Although obviously soda and video games are nowhere close to alcohol in terms of destructive potential for those who develop an addiction).

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