Later in the day, my guitarist audition was canceled. Several others have responded. Time will tell, I am repelled by the idea of a trio as it means relying on yet another person. On that happy note, I took a bike ride down one of Hollywood’s ridiculous bike paths. By that, I mean the discontinuous idiotic paths that go nowhere. This particular one I called the “Hat-Size Path” because it goes 8-7/8ths blocks down the wrong side of the street, the right side being the one with the water view, safety rail and palm trees.
It then peters out and directs bicycles back into the traffic lanes. Hollywood is full of these paths that go nowhere, maybe I’ll feature others. I emailed the lot, along with photos of the tour, to Cahoots. I included such sights as abandoned motels, tree stumps, graffiti and peeling paint. Throw in “constant signs of Florida’s entrepreneurial spirit that fly in the face of business recession if not a few zoning restrictions” and billed it as the “most enjoyable four minutes” ever spent in the area.
Not being tired, I ran some numbers y’day. It confirms my suspicion that China may be a better business deal than even I imagined (in the short run). The reason is entirely America’s own fault due to the structure of business here. We may have considered ourselves a model for success at some point in the past but now it’s the rope to hang us. We foolishly thought if others copied out system, they would copy the obvious inefficiencies, too.The problem appears to be the way we cling to the outdated systems of middleman. Yeah, I’ve noted it before, but never quantified it. American distances made small stores in each little town profitable even though such a system is laughably inefficient. That inefficiency gave rise to the middleman. The difference, and it is an important difference, was that in the past the middleman performed at least some duties that had a cause and effect relationship to the price of the article being sold. He stored it, or delivered it, or something.
Now, the middleman focuses on selling it. That is very shortsighted, but you see the effect whenever you are offered a “service contract”. The store has no interest in repairing or replacing defective merchandise, just in unloading it onto you. The core of the middleman problem is even worse – it follows a formula that no longer has relevance. This is the method of tripling your cost, a policy which seems to have had roots in the fact that at one time stores did have to cover the costs of defective merchandise. That wonderful service has largely been removed.
Here is what I calculated. The factory builds it for a dollar, sells it for three. The wholesaler gets it for three and sells it for nine. The retailer picks it up for nine and retails it for twenty-seven. This is hypothetical and also arbitrary, because the party that sold the direct [raw] materials to the factory considers them the end-user, and so on. At this point, you see that prices have risen to twenty-seven times the original cost.
However, now plug in the middleman, who no longer creates or adds any value. His job centers on selling the product. Americans buy this nonsense because they remember the good old days. The middleman position takes equal place beside the wholesaler and retailer, it is now the job of moving the product while avoiding any responsibility for anything except growing sales figures. If he is considered a part of the chain, the product quickly leaps to eighty-one times the cost. I do believe many of the outrageous prices seen today are a result of this system. It makes most article so expensive, they only be sold on credit.
Don’t be too harsh on my analysis, for I was examining the rise in prices through the system and not looking for social issues. Mind you, it now makes more sense why credit reports have become the single most important aspect of business life. Why identifying you has become more important than listening to your reasons, and why a fortune is spent trying to convince you that a salesman is required to buy things. That may have once been true for expensive things, but now it has extended to things that have become expensive. The cover story is that you must be shown the value and explained the advantages, which is basically a load of bunk. You are being sounded out for credit-worthiness. You don’t think the salesman actually cares about your zip code, do you?
This degenerate system is entrenched in America. Try to buy a new car without having to deal with a grinning idiot salesman. It is impossible. Try to go to a college to take one course for content rather than credit. Same thing, except he’s called a “counselor”. Pay now, learn later. None of these people will tell you the price over the phone. I peered into this structure to see where this eighty-one-fold increase in price went and maybe more people should think it through. My model was simplistic, but like most economic theory, the extreme cases are the simpler to understand.
So do I fix the system, or conspire to eliminate two or three layers of middleman and pocket the money? Do I put salesman out of work and maybe the businesses that force salesmen on you? Do you think I’d lower the price to what is reasonable? Do you think I’ll consider what happens to the neighborhood or shops that have been there since before the flood? Do you think I would pity anyone who operated within the existing system without giving their own position a second thought? Do I owe anything to the way things are? Does anyone deserve my loyalty?
Yes, I did have time on my hands today. My students all cancelled out, including one who became a great-grandparent. Imagine, people my age already fourth generation. I was also in the shop to download MySQL and Apache as preliminaries to the Area Code database. Again, the manuals are proving inadequate, often giving directions of things to type without specifying where and assuming you know which are DOS-based. There is also a program called MD5 they keep referring to that appears to do nothing.
Once I got it running, it is just the same old SQL with a few minor changes to make it somewhat graphical in nature, and a few overlays to make it friendlier. The hard part will be making all these things work together, I think.
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