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WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

mattstoller.substack.com

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Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#331

Post by rhizome »

munk-a wrote: post #224
WalterBright wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure Amazon was profitable all along - it's just that the profit was all spent on expanding the business. Hence, there was no taxable profit. Amazon was also able to make money selling products at little or no markup by taking advantage of the float. They'd collect money from the purchaser immediately, and would pay the vendor after 90 days. Then, Amazon would make interest on that money for the 90 days. I…

Bookstores provide a lot of service value, a decent bookstore will allow you to find similar material, allow you to browse as you please (instead of the skimpy sample pages), usually contain an expert that can offer advice and allow you to walk out with your purchase. Additionally it's common to see a heavy effort at investing in the atmosphere. Amazon has succeeded at beating bookstores in none of these categories -…

Yep: one major advantage of bookstores is that their recommendation engines work several magnitudes better, and reliably. I believe they always will, too.

I think it's also possible that at least part of Amazon's success was due to creating/increasing price sensitivity in an era where wage stagnation has become more and more apparent. That is, they are also the Dollar Saver & K-Mart of the Internet.

The segments that Amazon has conquered may be more abstract than those they're usually given credit for. Segments like "poor people."

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#332

Post by rhizome »

marnett wrote: post #263
munk-a wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookstores provide a lot of service value, a decent bookstore will allow you to find similar material, allow you to browse as you please (instead of the skimpy sample pages), usually contain an expert that can offer advice and allow you to walk out with your purchase. Additionally it's common to see a heavy effort at investing in the atmosphere. Amazon has succeeded at beating bookstores in none of these categories -…

I'd consult goodreads.com (ownded by Amazon) to meet your criteria of matching experience with respect to genuine reviews, similar book recommendations, etc. It's not a flashy service by all means and has definitely been neglected by Amazon since the acquisition; the community makes it what it is, and it is a very high quality community!

I've read that Goodreads has kind of an opposite problem to shill reviews: everything you write about a book is always completely public, so people don't write them.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#333

Post by jaredsohn »

jboy55 wrote: post #265
munk-a wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookstores provide a lot of service value, a decent bookstore will allow you to find similar material, allow you to browse as you please (instead of the skimpy sample pages), usually contain an expert that can offer advice and allow you to walk out with your purchase. Additionally it's common to see a heavy effort at investing in the atmosphere. Amazon has succeeded at beating bookstores in none of these categories -…

If I try to build up a history of bookstores as I remember them as a consumer, at one point there were many small stores. A mall may have 3-4 book stores, all taking around the same space as any other retail store. There were also 'used' book stores and some niche stores around. When you didn't know what to buy, you browsed the generic stores and pretty much they all had the same content, if you sought out a niche/us…

For those curious, it looks like Barnes and Noble is still around but Borders and Waldenbooks are not.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#334

Post by losttheplot »

Engaging in such a strategy used to be illegal, and was known as predatory pricing.

The Sherman Act and the Clayton Act are no longer enforced in the post Citizens United world, i.e. legal US corruption: kochtopus, dark money, super-pac, 501-c-3 foundations and institutes, etc.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#335

Post by ClumsyPilot »

spookthesunset wrote: post #220
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would it take to convince you that unregulated markets lead to fraud? Are events like 2008 and dotCom bubble unimpressive to you?

Don’t forget crypto currency. Massive* unregulated market that is probably 99% fraud. *of course because it is completely unregulated we have no real way to determine if it is truly a “massive” market or just a relatively small amount of people painting the tape with wash trading....

Crypto is an experiment, and everyone knows that. The 2008 crisis happened to AAA rated securities.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#336

Post by bsder »

perl4ever wrote: post #304
bsder wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon didn't invent mail order. And were particularly bad at it for a long time. Selling books was the only thing keeping the company afloat during that span. > They never have had a monopoly on websites that sell stuff to be delivered by mail, either. Actually, they did on books. You seem like you may be young. In 1994-1996, credit cards were nowhere near as ubiquitous and certainly the online use of them was eve…

Not paying sales tax on mail order was the norm. The time period you're talking about, Amazon, and the internet in general, hadn't penetrated to the general public. 1995-96 was just when a small minority of people were waking up to the idea they needed to be on the internet and getting their first direct PPP dialup account. People still went to physical book stores because, for one thing, you couldn't preview a book…

> Not paying sales tax on mail order was the norm.

You're forgetting that mail order wasn't the norm--even if you ordered from a catalog you picked it up in person at the store. So, not collecting tax on mail order wasn't a big deal until Amazon flattened bookstores with it.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#337

Post by yalogin »

This is the second scam that investors fell for. First Theranos and now WeWork. In both cases the founder is a cheat and a fraud. My guess is investors didn’t want to believe it’s fraud and desperately wanted it to be a real company and so kept funding them.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#338

Post by tmiahm »

I really enjoyed the author's perspective on this, and I like well-reasoned arguments from people whom I probably don't align with politically. To confirm my assumptions, I checked the About page

> Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Open Markets Institute

Ok, what's that? A Koch sounding name, but I'm guessing more Soros because of the repeated calls to government action on this (and the Dodd-Frank connection). A quick search led to a Politico article https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/14/open-market-instit... which contained this nugget:

> Despite its small size — 15 or so employees operating out of a shared WeWork space in downtown D.C. — Open Markets...

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#339

Post by dboreham »

WalterBright wrote: post #235
munk-a wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookstores provide a lot of service value, a decent bookstore will allow you to find similar material, allow you to browse as you please (instead of the skimpy sample pages), usually contain an expert that can offer advice and allow you to walk out with your purchase. Additionally it's common to see a heavy effort at investing in the atmosphere. Amazon has succeeded at beating bookstores in none of these categories -…

I buy a lot more books from Amazon than I did before Amazon existed. The reasons are simple: 1. I can get pretty much any book ever printed, not just newly printed books. 2. Prices are usually better. 3. The friction to buying them is very low. If I want to buy books by the lot, such as every book in a series, I usually go to ebay.

Also Amazon (or to be fair any Internet book indexing service such as Google) allows me to know about books that I would almost certainly never have known existed in Barnes&Noble days.

Re: WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism

#340

Post by dboreham »

rhizome wrote: post #331
munk-a wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookstores provide a lot of service value, a decent bookstore will allow you to find similar material, allow you to browse as you please (instead of the skimpy sample pages), usually contain an expert that can offer advice and allow you to walk out with your purchase. Additionally it's common to see a heavy effort at investing in the atmosphere. Amazon has succeeded at beating bookstores in none of these categories -…

Yep: one major advantage of bookstores is that their recommendation engines work several magnitudes better, and reliably. I believe they always will, too. I think it's also possible that at least part of Amazon's success was due to creating/increasing price sensitivity in an era where wage stagnation has become more and more apparent. That is, they are also the Dollar Saver & K-Mart of the Internet. The segments that…

>recommendation engines work several magnitudes better, and reliably

Surely that's only true for a vanishingly small subset of fields of interest?

e.g. I want to read books on construction site drainage. Is the dude in Borders going to have any tiny clue about that?

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