(This post was last modified: 05-18-2024, 06:58 PM by DanLaw.)
(05-15-2024, 12:44 PM)mrdoug Wrote:(05-14-2024, 11:45 AM)Dragonsbeard Wrote: So from a really simple perspective. The artisan who let’s say has a shave soap that normally sells for $20 through a vendor or their website the normal wholesale price to the vendor is Keystone which is $10 per jar. So the vendor retail price and the artisan retail price is one and the same, $20. In this new system the Artisan sells the middle man the soap at 25% which is $5 and the middle man in turn then sells it to the vendor at more than the $10 he was paying for it before, so they are forced to mark it up to a higher retail price or accept a lower profit margin. This will hurt the vendor and in some cases the customer.
Don't forget the manufacturer loses too, Frank. Sure, he may make the same money by selling in bulk, But what about next month... and the months to come? Unless the market is booming with a shortage of products, he's going to stop getting orders as this new middleman has a backlog of products in their warehouse. Also, how will that soap, aftershave, etc age in their warehouse?
It just seems to me that everyone in the traditional supply chain loses in this scenario, and any soapmaker who partakes in this sort of new supply chain is asking for the grim fate they'll ultimately meet.
But... It's a free market economy. It's supposed to right itself when issues like this arise. Hopefully this is short term and all of those 'get quick fast' folks go the way of the dodo.
Frank made it clear that the producer loses half of what he normally makes while saving hardly anything all in the interest of volume. I think everybody has come to see how an unregulated free market works - only an ever decreasing few are profiting and happy. In the free market's wake has come unprecedented poverty and social unrest - that is why the current economy has been termed neofeudalism.