Fully agreed. The cynical side of me wonders how much of that is due to publishers giving college departments/professors kickbacks in return for requiring students to buy those overpriced books. For example, a professor was reprimanded by his department for refusing to assign his students a $180 textbook.
So in a sense, “disruption” of this racket also requires solving the human corruption angle. Which, as history shows us, can probably never be done.
Mostly is that you’ll never get good wine in groceries, just mass produced wines (which is better than it used to be, but still not particularly good). But with the most popular wines in groceries, it cuts into liquor store sales (no one can stay in business if their most popular items stop selling).
Some would survive, certainly, but the smaller liquor stores, especially in small towns, would be badly hurt. They’re having enough trouble as people drink less; supermarket wines would be devastating.
The states that do have both either have State liquor stores or have liquor stores that had decades to adjust. That won’t happen today.
I don’t think so, because they don’t carry much in the way of single malts or expensive wines NOW. They sell the stuff that turns over quickly in their market, and that isn’t Aberlour or Chateau Pavie Saint-Emilion Grand Cru. Small-town liquor stores tend to be big on Jim Beam and Sutter Home. If you want something relatively unpopular, right now that means a trip to a specialty liquor store in the big city.
Yep. And in any sensible future it means a few clicks on Booze-azon’s website. Small town folks have always been left behind when it comes to nice things and wide choices regardless of what product we’re discussing. Keeping Joe’s Crossroads Liquor Store open by preventing competition is not the way to fix that.
In my experience, the opposite is true. This is purely anecdotal, but it seems to me theaters are starting up upgrade the experience: bigger, reclining seats. Sometimes there’s food service. Maybe a nice bar in the lobby.
Buying and selling houses is a lot more difficult more complicated than buying and selling an furniture on Craigslist. My parents have bought and sold a number of properties and the they would never even attempt to try it without a real estate agent. For someone that might move two or three times in a lifetime it makes even less sense to try to navigate the process.
Bless you. I just stopped using a textbook at all, because I was so disgusted by the publishers saying “Sorry, your students can’t use last year’s $78 textbook, because we only print the new $125 one, and we’ve made tiny additions to each chapter, which changes all the page numbers of course.”
I started making my own handouts, with hilarious illustrations of course. Wish I’d kept teaching til I’d had enough to make my own textbook…
But honestly, what worked best was just ending class by writing on the board: “Google Fibonacci. Easy as 1, 1, 2, 3… Post 3 examples of Golden Section (architecture, fine art, page design) before class Monday.”
My local supermarket has a case with higher end liquor locked up. Out of curiosity, I looked for the most expensive. $2,999 for a fairly small bottle of brandy (or maybe cognac?). So, yeah- high end.
I’m just going by the grocery stores that sell beer and wine around here. I think you might be able to get a $30-35 bottle of wine there, but the vast majority are somewhere between about $6 and $25.
Meanwhile, the local liquor stores carry the gamut from Franzia box wine all the way to stuff like Chateau Margaux 1995. I would figure that if they carried liquor it would be similar- you might be able to get say… Gentleman Jack or maybe Woodford Reserve, but you’re not going to find Knob Creek for example.
And this is why so many industries that you would think are “ripe for disruption” remain stubbornly resistant to it – because politically influential incumbents are able to get the state to put a thumb on the scale in their favor.
Car dealership are a particularly perfect example. Every state legislative district has a car dealership in it, most likely several. Car dealers tend to be well-connected in their community, as they depend on their reputation and relationships to bring in business. And they tend to have a fair amount of money to throw around. It’s the perfect storm for political influence.
Thanks for the post. I think the only thing I knew was that theaters make a much better profit margin on concessions than they do with ticket sales. But I had never considered that the impact a shorter run in theaters had on their bottom line. I still think there’s an upset coming for theaters coming though. It’s true that you still can’t quite duplicate the theater experience at home, but if a family of four can spend $30 to watch Mulan it may prove to be a more attractive alternative than a movie theater for many families.
I think it’s a safe assumption that they don’t play stupid games when the elected members of the state assembly come in to buy a car either.
Not to the buyer, no. They charge the dealers per enquiries they send their way.
These may be true, and the last time I saw a movie in the U.S. before moving to Europe, it was in an auditorium with improved seating. However, it was also dirty, and the bright screens of texters and the beeps and buzzes of incoming calls and messages were very distracting. The exhibitor can put in all the fancy seats they want, but if they can’t afford the labor to clean the space and enforce the no-cell-phone policy, the actual experience of sitting in the fancy seat in the dark is gonna be fairly irritating. At home? Not an issue.
(To be fair, texting is a non-zero problem here in Europe as well. On the other hand, I’ve never once heard a phone’s ring or chirp or whatever. Dunno if it’s better etiquette, or just a cultural habit of keeping the device on vibrate most of the time anyway.)
Washington just allowed liquor in grocery stores recently (within last 5 to 8 years). We now have better liquor stores than we had with state stores (some with exceptional variety, even in our small town) (https://www.highspiritsliquor.com/about-us.html) and some grocery stores carry a nice wine selection. (not Safeway, but smaller local chains).
peccavi might as well live in my area. The two large chains in my town both have a high end, locked liquor cabinet with stuff that costs hundreds if not thousands of dollars. The selection of liquor is quite extensive as well. Much better than any of the non-warehouse liquor stores, that’s for sure. The closest store has a 2 full walls cooler for beer, 3.5 aisles of wines and 1.5 aisles of liquor. Last time I checked there were maybe a dozen bourbons. None of them were low end rot gut. That stuff only sells at the corner liquor store.
I really try to avoid Pearson or Cengage for their overpriced textbooks. I can sometimes justify it if it’s a multiple-semester course. For computer topics, wikipedia is just fine (or any of the GeekGreek or w3chools). A textbook just can’t include all of the details about, say heapsort, that wikipedia has.
Often I’ll just go to a Barnes and Nobles and browse the mass-market paperback books in the computer technology. I like the Head First series and Jon Duckett’s JavaScript/jQuery books, so I’ll create a course around those, adding labs and quizzes and tests that Pearson has as part of their products (and that I never use). So $39 instead of $139, plus a book students can put on a bookshelf that’s not obviously a textbook; that’s a win.
You’re exactly right. Except for specialty docs the pay is probably closer to x7 or x8. I was rounding up.
I agree about the debt incurred in medical school and residency. This makes it hard for even well established doctors to agree to cutting wages because they are effectively screwing over the new docs just coming out of school (financially).
In terms of “power” I was referring to the political power structure in most hospitals. In all the hospitals I’ve worked at the Board is at the top with the CEO and Chief Medical Officer directly below them. In other words, the top tier of the medical staff is at the same level as the CEO; the CEO of the hospital cannot order the CMO (and by proxy the medical staff under them) to do anything. The Board is the only entity which can order the CMO to do something, as well as fire and hire them.
Note MRI costs aren’t indicative of healthcare. The equipment is very expensive to buy and run and the cost is high (hundreds of dollars) in research. Any “free” MRI costs are subsidized, but it’s not artificially inflated.
Washington has much better laws than its neighbors immediately to the south and east, but the alcohol taxes are I think the highest in the nation. The $13 bottle of Kirkland vodka is something like $23.