I was shocked, unbelieving and then cynically accepting when ABEbooks was taken over by the evil Amazon.
An old SF novel by the socialist American Frederik Pohl had something like “food” , “fuel” etc. left as conglomerates monopolized everything. I thought it was so stupid I didn’t read the novel (JEM).
In later years I keep seeing it true (Kraft and a few others have all kinds of food items, ——Look at the list of Gillette items —not simply for shaving but lots of stuff-—and even my eye drops were taken over by their competitor recently).
Yup. I had intuited the “Rule of Threes” before I found that it was already discovered. By that I mean that there are two market leaders, oligopolistically competitive (e.g. Coke and Pepsi) a distant third, and then a number of boutique and niche players with no hope of breaking into the top two.
Even in areas where there seem to be more vendors, there is usually ownership of several companies by one big company. There are some areas where you have one very dominant player (Gillette, or Pepsico’s Frito-Lay) and a bunch of smaller players fighting for remaining marketshare (Edgewell[Schick/Wilkinson/Harry’s], BIC, Unilever[Dollar Shave Club]).
As an extreme example of market consolidation, I like to use candy bars. How many candy bar companies can you buy from at the corner drug store? Mars, Hershey, Nestle...
How many could I buy when I was a paperboy in 1973, from a candy rack considerably smaller than the one in a modern CVS or Walgreen’s?
M&M/Mars, Hershey, Nestle, Leaf (Whoppers), Hollywood (Zero, Payday, many others), Peter Paul (Almond Joy, Mounds, York Peppermint Patty), Beech-Nut (Life Savers), Nabisco (Junior Mints, Sugar Babies), Holloway/Beatrice (Milk Duds), Heide (Jujubes, Chocolate Babies), Bonomo (Turkish Taffy), Sandard/Curtiss (Baby Ruth), Heath (Heath Bar), and more that I don’t remember. (a couple of bit players like Tootsie Roll, and Ferrara Pan’s parent still exist as independents).
Of course, the best selling bars themselves have mostly survived. But we lost having a vibrant candy industry scattered throughout the country to a handful of factories, largely in Mexico and Canada (combination of sugar tariffs & NAFTA).
And the candy bars are neither better nor cheaper (even adjusted for overall inflation).