Impulse Buys: Can a Company Make This Mistake?
Is it possible for entire companies to make impulse buys? To buy something, like an entire other company, because “it looks cool” and “it’s a good price!” while having no idea what they actually plan to do with it? I think it is possible. I think it does happen.
But when I buy something which “looks cool” and “it’s a good price!” while having no actual idea what I plan to do with it, that’s just me. That piece of gear can sit on my shelf for years with no harm or inconvenience to anyone else. I can eventually decide to throw it away. And there will be no harm to or inconvenience to anyone else.
When a company is bought, left to molder for years, and is eventually thrown away, there’s a whole user base which is affected.
Customer Relations: Did Something Change?
It used to be a trope about customer relations and marketing that it was far easier to retain happy customers than to get new ones. And that an angry customer will tell far more people about their complaints than a satisfied customer will tell about their happinesses. What happened to these tropes? Have they been repudiated? Have they been disproven? I don’t know.
I do know customers of a company get very angry when that company is killed off by a parent organization for no good reason. And those customers generally do not see “we wanted to launch our own homegrown version” as a good reason to kill of an existing company and product which worked just fine.
So, what question was the parent company trying to answer when it originally bought the company it later killed? I don’t know, but I’m not sure the people who advocated and approved the acquisitions know either.
Maybe Caution Will Return
Way down on my list of books to read is Tepper’s The Myth of Capitalism (I might have the title wrong, I’m not going to check it right now). It’s about how many industries have become monopolies, monopsonies, or oligopolies. Meaning, how many industries have become dominate by six or four or fewer large companies who own the majority of other companies in the industry. I’ve listened to a few podcasts about the book, and one question was “what causes this?” The answer was “we’re not sure, but it seems to happen more when interest rates are low for a long time.”
And interest rates were low, for almost 15 years. They are now rising. Will we see more entrants and startups in industries dominated by a few players? I certainly hope so. Maybe the trend of buying up companies on impulse, to kill them a few years later, will cease. I certainly hope that happens too.
What generated this whole rant was the article “They Used to Be a Big Shot, Now Eagle PCB Is No More” by Jenny List, dated June 9 2023, in Hackaday. The article is informative (as List’s articles always are; I enjoy reading her work). The comments are worth reading too.