Posted on 10/23/2013 5:09:58 AM PDT by Rebelbase
WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government is going into uncharted waters, deep-sixing the giant paper nautical charts that it has been printing for mariners for more than 150 years.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Tuesday that to save money, the government will stop turning out the traditional brownish, heavy paper maps after mid-April.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Let's see how this works. I'll be given a monopoly to deliver newspapers to 500,000 houses in the city, and the people who live in those houses must pay a rate that covers my expense of printing and delivering the papers. I can even roll any added costs for additional space in under that same rate.
Now I go to businesses to sell advertising in those papers. What is my overhead to including their ads? Just about zero, so if I sell $20,000 in ads for Sunday, I'll make right abut $20,000.
How about the competition? What is their overhead to print and hand deliver the same amount of advertising to those 500,000 houses? Its certainly more than $0.04 per house, which means they'll lose money.
Are other parties prohibited from entering the market by law? No. Are they prohibited from entering by simple mathmatics? Yes.
If that doesn't make sense to you, imagine I'm being given Snickers bars for free and selling them for 50 cents each. Are you free to go buy some Snickers bars at 50 cents each and compete with me?
They’ll sell/give it to AQ or the muzzie brotherhood...if they haven’t already.
The ammo I mean.
You are so involved in being right you can’t seem to read what I’m saying.
Telephone books never had a monopoly because anyone could print a book and mail it out to anyone in the region, and companies did at no cost to the consumer!
If you are so correct that this barrier to entry was so high nobody would enter then why would they enter? Because companies did. You also assume companies rolled the cost of books into their rate(you don’t know that) in fact many major companies are compromised of divisions that operate purely on their own. Even if you were correct in stating that they rolled the costs of the books into their rate, companies like Yellow Book found it plenty lucrative to publish a 2nd rate book and make money off of it. Your premise is flawed.
Look friend, if you can’t understand that a guarnteed monopoly on phone service, with rates that covered the printing of phone books, gave an insurmountable advantage to the phone company, then I’m almost at a loss to help you. If you don’t think you are paying for that printing of that phone book that lands on your front door via your rates, then again, I can’t help you.
Why did other companies enter? Because, as I pointed out initially, the phone company had so exceeded any reasonable ad rate that there was some room for margin; however, that margin was always thin compared to the phone company, which made them uncompetitive.
1. The cost of the phone company printing the books and distributing them was paid for by the customer. That is a huge cost. The competition had to take that cost out of profits.
2. The phone company had a system by which new advertising customers had to immediately register with them. The competition had to go and look for clients. Not cheap.
3. A business had a choice of paying the phone company an outrageous amount for advertising, paying less to a competitor that never had any chance of suceeding, or paying both. It turns out that extortion works, when its not a bluff.
I’m not sure what business you’re in, but you wouldn’t be in it for long if the government gave your competitor the type of advantage that the phone company had with the yellow pages.
Of course they had the advantage, I never said they didn’t have an advantage, they have an advantage like google has an advantage or verizon has an advantage or even microsoft has an advantage.
Your point was that the phone company had a monopoly, they didn’t in regards to phone books and they certainly didn’t in terms of advertising. In order to build a business you didn’t have to have an ad in the phone book, in fact many people built a business simply off of word of mouth, or maybe they used billboards or radio or tv.
Your point is it’s extortion which is worse a lie and at best naive. The advertising market in any city was simply run off of supply and demand like anything. If people decided to use a 3rd party publisher balking at their own telephone company 3rd party rates would have been driven higher.
So point by point.
1st the monopolies were closing looked at for their phone rates just like utility companies are. Publishing phone books was a cost like any other that was viewed independently of phone lines themselves.
2nd Just because a line was activated at the company didn’t give them a distinct advantage on advertising because the company didn’t have to pay the rates they were asking for. If a new business felt like they HAD to advertise in order to bring in customers they had many media types are their disposal. Also, all companies including the home phone company had outside reps that would go and visit new businesses, an expense shared by all.
3rd Now you are just casting stones, Yellow book was a successful company all on it’s own, many phone companies did overlap for example Verizon overlapped with Qwest(Centurylink) to compete for the same area. A 3rd party publisher didn’t have to be a small company, in fact some were large phone companies that reached out beyond their phone subscriber base. The home base phone book was always the most popular but not the only one used.
Whatever. Seriously, you are being obstinate or you simply cannot understand simple math. I give up. You will never get it, not in a million years, not with pictures, not with charts, I would sooner get a raccoon to do calculus.
Cash cow monopolies in no way effect the competitive advantage of closely tied business concerns in your world and nothing is ever going to penetrate that world.
Your point wasn’t a competitive advantage, if it was you would of already read that I conceded that point to you because I never disagreed to you.
You said the phone company extorted money based not on a competitive advantage but an absolute monopoly. Which based on your reaction you now realized I ripped to shreds.
Indeed that was my point. The monopoly on phone service, which was absolutely tied to phone directory distribution, provided what was an effective monopoly on business directory advertising. When a company is handed an enormous competitive advantage, the effect is the same as an exclusionary monopoly.
You said the phone company extorted money based not on a competitive advantage but an absolute monopoly. Which based on your reaction you now realized I ripped to shreds.
So that is the face saving line you've chosen to fall back on? Weak, but whatever.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.