Fun fact that chart is outdated, it's worse now!
In a future capitalist dystopia, the Empire (aka USA) will be renamed "United States of Amazon Prime®", and every 4 years the name will be replaced by the name of some other mega oligopoly
So, basically the script of idiocracy
Welcome to Costco, I love you.
That's just the book Snowcrash
Interesting, I don't know the work so I'll look into it
Hey at least it will have a distinguishable name for the first time
(There are multiple "united states" in America, such as The United Mexican States and The Federative Republic of Brazil)
We are Verizon-Chipotle-Exxon, and we're proud to be one of America's eight companies!
What happened to our anti trust laws?
The people that enforce them are, ironically, untrustworthy.
Sounds like antitrust people ought to be untrustworthy. Linguistically, ya know?
Wait, is that where it went wrong?
What's funny about the US experiment is that capitalism is supposedly the better way but at the same time when capitalism runs its course the government feels the need to intervene because it doesn't take long for capitalism to become a monopoly and for the free market to disappear, but that's as far as the reflection goes...
Conglomeration occurs naturally - economies of scale in a large organization give it an advantage over smaller ones. Similar to how cities naturally occur. The problem is the organizations are not democratically controlled and so they act in ways that are unsustainable, anti customer and anti worker. Workers should manage the organization through a one person one vote principle (sometimes multi-stakeholder coops would make sense), and all commercial entities should be regulated by a democratic government.
That would be better true but I argue that even if you compare companies to cities the same problem occurs with cities, mega or very big cities are not sustainable or easier to manage, they just occur naturally.
I don't think even if a company is worker owned or democratically controlled may still choose to go against the customer or competition with monopolistic practices so I'm not sure it's possible to have mega corps be very positive in any way to society.
"I'm from Buenos Aires, and I say kill 'em all!"
Is that website still around? I think it was like theyowneverything.com
You'd rather have one option than 9 (plus hundreds of smaller companies that do exist, but aren't well known national brands, and the fact that even though many of those brands are owned by the same large company, they are still really different products)?
Well, bad for you if it is a crappy option. The company doesn't care for quality as the consumer has no other option. Hurray for Amazon, our everyday feeder. And for those working at Amazon, only one toilet break per week, as there are no other options for work!
