SINGAPORE - A BreadTalk customer who was eating a snack she bought from the bakery chain bit into a stainless steel mould left by mistake in the pastry before it was baked. The customer – in a post written in Chinese on social media platform Xiaohongshu on Jan 8 – said she bought the pastry from a BreadTalk outlet at...
I've been listening to the #freakonomics episode on #adamSmith. It reminds me that the power and benefits of #capitalism aren't because it ensures "free markets". The benefits come from intense competition, which makes the vendors better and the products cheaper. Pretty much the entire success of the modern world is built on this #competition (+ #scientificMethod).
Unfortunately, the natural course of a free market, driven by well-known and well-taught business strategies, is to avoid competition, by using customer lock-in and other anti-competitive moves until you get to effective #monopoly power. Once you have monopoly power, you can go into harvest mode, raising prices and spending less, mostly on protecting the "moats" around your monopoly.
What we really need is not #freeMarket, it's #freeCompetition.
So when you hear a public policy debate or a business tycoon going on about "free markets" you should ask yourself -- would this make competition easier or harder? Would it give consumers and customers more choice or less choice?
This is one of the main reasons I have devoted most of my career to running or helping #startUps. A new underdog entrant is the essence of competition and expanding choices. Unfortunately, any startup that is successful enough to become dominant in its industry, becomes anti-competitive and can become a drag on society's progress.
Whew, I didn't expect that to be so long! I better stop now. Please let me know what you think.
Renatomancer
bsmall2
Joseph Lim 
Ames 
