“Columbus and the other ‘explorers’ were looking for a shorter trade route...”
I’m not talking about better trade routes and distribution - that benifits people on both sides of a transaction. I’m talking about marketing practices that benifit the merchant but actually lower consumers’ standard of living.
This has not always been the case.
A good example is the department store strategy of purposely making it difficult to find what you are looking for. They want you to get lost, walk down every aisle so you’ll pass by as many items as possible.
Another example is pop up links disguised as a download button - they purposely send you on a wild goose chase and obstruct your effort to read what you want to read, or download what you want to download.
Post offices used to deliver mail in exchange for the price of a stamp. Now they earn money by stuffing your mailbox with unwanted flyers.
They have calculated that it is worth abusing and wasting the time of millions of people in order to make a couple hundred sales.
It’s the marketing equivalent of fishing with a stick of dynamite.
This has not always been the case.
I imagine an unjust scale has been around a LONG time...