Posts by: Kyle T. Westra
Once the investment is made, its cost no longer factors into the marginal cost of producing a product. Fixed costs are an important part of a go-or-no-go decision for a company at the onset of production, but should not factor into the price of a product going forward. Fixed costs are sunk costs.
More Different consumers care about different things. Some will care that their THC-laced gummies have fewer other chemicals, some won’t. But the ones that do are probably willing to pay a premium for those products. We certainly see that in the organics aisle at a grocery store. Why would cannabis products be any different?
More Dedication to understanding its customers makes a company more knowledgeable about the competitive landscape and better equipped to anticipate changing conditions. The entire company feels less insular and more connected to its existential purpose: serving customer needs profitably.
More Colombians are correctly proud of their coffee and flowers, but at first it came as a surprise that Colombia may not always be the best place to buy Colombian agricultural goods. Much of their optimal produce is destined for export.
More For Amazon Web Services (AWS), on the other hand, while your final price depends on your usage, the pricing is transparent down to the hour. While you may not know the amount due ahead of time, you know exactly how they will arrive at that number.
More One of the strongest arguments against advertising as the primary method of monetization is that you pay with your time and attention, which is a resource both finite and irreplaceable. Services like Spotify aggregate hundreds of labels on one easily accessible interface and payment system.
More We’re visual creatures, too. Whereas programs like iTunes and Spotify will display album art, it’s not the same experience as standing before a rack of albums. Similarly with books, despite all of the advantages of e-readers, they have not captured the experience of examining a wall of books. Digital is great, but, unsurprisingly, there are features of the physical world that still have a certain primacy for, well, physical beings:
More What Tesla has changed for the automotive industry is now that upselling process can continue long after the purchase of the vehicle. If you buy a S60 then get a better-paying job with a longer commute, you can choose to upgrade with essentially no additional cost to serve for Tesla. And spacing out the payments for the vehicle and later the capacity may make the original vehicle purchase more palatable for the consumer.
More Marina Krakovsky argues in a compelling new book that conventional wisdom was wrong. The Middleman Economy argues that, while transaction costs have decreased for everyone, they have decreased at an even faster rate for professional middlemen, leading to have an even larger role in today’s economy.
More The fact that consumers buy gas on a continuum rather than in discrete gallons (unless you’re a wizard with the gas nozzle handle) likely makes it easier for both sides to live with the current arrangement. The pump price and volume numbers go along until the tank is full or you release the handle, and there perhaps isn’t much analytical thought put into the final ratio that appears.
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