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The better model would be to attract a lot of customers with cheaper coffee, but also offer premium options.

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There is basically no room to under sell current coffee shops. Indie spots barely turn profit and the big names successfully sell low tier product for premium prices. If a good latte is 4 bucks and you charge 2 you need to sell twice as many to cover rent. I worked at a place that switched the espresso beans to a cheaper mass produced product to up the margin. People stopped coming immediately, the quality was important.

It would also take away from the aura of "premium" coffee.

I honestly get better coffee brewed on my own from Hills Brothers than I do from Starbucks or Dunkin.

Maybe mom and pop shops can beat them when it comes to black coffee, but I can think of one small place I've ever been to where anything beyond that saves money, it's usually the opposite. Those lattes and shit are not cheap even when the big places can buy the actually valuable ingredients at high scales. And I'm pretty sure that one place that competed was campus subsidized. It was also not good coffee.

Iirc the local place I went to back when I lived nearby sold black coffee at about 70 cents cheaper for a large cup, and being the local place with maybe three employees ever on at a time in a liberal neighborhood, was absolutely packed during any rush time. That 70 cents isn't going to kill Dunkin, their convenience, familiarity, app preorders, bigger menu, often ideal locations for being on the go, etc. I believe the local place near me now is more expensive than dunkin, so it's not even assured that local places can even try that.

There's a demographic of people who want a local place that is cheap and familiar to them, but there's a much, much larger one that wants the convenience of a chain, or if not that a place that specializes in gourmet coffee like a roaster, which also isn't going to be cheap. And if people are super money conscious, they'll make coffee at home, or gas station coffee on the go, which isn't all awful. A coffee place at a cheaper price point than what's out there right now doesn't seem very viable at all.

Some lack all spoken and written language and may use picture exchange systems for language

Some may read and wrote but be mute either selectively (which can be linked to anxiety) or permanently

Some may ha e auditory processing problems and may not be able to mentally process or catagorize the audio they hear, this can impact speech

People still buy and want name brands. Sometimes this is just because of brand loyalty, other times they perceive real differences in quality between name brands and store brands. So if people really want Ritz crackers and not an off-brand, they'll stop shopping at a place that doesn't sell Ritz.

Some stores DO take this approach. For example, Trader Joe's only sells their own brand. But you'll note they are much smaller than chains that sell other brands like Kroger, Publix, HEB, etc.

I'm sure the stores think about it. But they know some % of customers who buy the name brands will stop shopping entirely if the name brands go away. So maybe some people will just buy the store brand Ritz crackers, but a lot of other people will go to a different store and that represents losing dozens of other item' worth of sales.

In the end, it doesn't matter what your margin is if there's not a customer to buy the product. So selling items at lower margins is better than not selling anything at all.

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All drinks are marked up a significant portion--it's where most profits come from in the restaurant world. You can buy coffee for a lot less. It probably won't be as fancy, but it'll probably be of similar quality for less.

People also generally perceive something that costs more as tasting better (this has been shown in several blind wine tastings). It's also something of a status symbol (although the people getting it probably won't admit it). Look at me I can pay a lot for a fancy looking cup of coffee. This is the same reason will buy a purse for thousands of dollars when one of essentially the same quality could be made and sold for under $100.

Some consumers shop for name brands, for whatever reason; if your store drops Coca Cola products, they may simply start buying soda at another store.

Having both name brand and generic brand products on shelves is good for the store. The people who don't care about the brand will buy the generic stuff, while the people who are adherents to a specific brand will buy the name brand stuff. Dropping either group of products will lose sales for the store.

Because people buy them and the profit margin is good

Brands pay for premium spots like aisle ends to run promotions etc

Because

I'll also add that the seam would be very easy to damage by shoving stuff like furniture up against it. Putting a board down to cover the corner makes the corner sturdier.

Good description, but to add:

I have a business degree.

You're asking a good question. But generally there's less money to be made in cheaper products.

Compare a Dollar General to an Apple Store, it's pretty obvious which company is more successful.

Krispy Kreme and Five Guys come to mind as businesses that were focused initially on one singular product. But they weren't necessarily focused on being cheaper. They used the savings of focusing on singular products to increase their overall growth.

Also... when it comes to coffee the cost savings you're describing aren't necessarily enough to motivate a consumer.

A small cup of coffee at starbucks is $1.55, at McDonalds $1... at this point it's kind of like driving out of your way to save a few cents on gas. Some people do, but not necessarily enough to motivate an entire new business model.

It didn't disappear.

There have been multiple smaller outbreaks since then, and one major pandemic in the mid-1800s.

The last plague oubreak in the US was in Los Angeles 1924-1925. Killed about 30 people.

The reason the plague ended was that people stopped spreading it. Successful implementation of quarantines is largely credited with depriving the disease of new human vectors. That, and it had already killed a third of Europe and basically burned through most of the susceptible population. It's harder for a pandemic to spread when the population density has dropped that much.

ETA: You can still catch a Yersinia pestis infection today if you really want to. Go hang around with the wrong rodents in, e.g., the US Southwest. A couple in Mongolia recently died of Plague after eating the wrong marmot.

No.

People won't pay the money when they can fly.

The reason high speed rail isn't a thing here is because the USA is a large country that is relatively sparsely populated compared to the regions in which high speed rail is used. The population density is too low in the US.

The size of Europe is only slightly larger than the US, but it has almost twice the people. China is a bit smaller than the US but has about 4 times the people.

We have a relatively high speed corridor on the east coast where the population density makes it viable.

They're trying to do it in California, but our population density is not sufficient to support it. It's a giant boondoggle for our local politicians to receive bribes and kickbacks from construction and design companies. In 2015 the projected costs for the "high speed train" (which they have since admitted wouldn't be all that high speed) was $10 billion and they were going to offer tickets for around $70 from LA to SF. The current estimate to complete the system is $100 billion and they haven't even really started so you can probably double this number. Do you think they're still going to offer $70 tickets when the costs will be over 10 times the initial estimate? Would you pay over $100 each way for a ticket on a train that'll take you 3 hours in travel time when the cost is closer to $60-$100 round trip for a 1 hour plane ride?

To my understanding, apple controls the design of chips placed between the host and device. No communication chip would indicate it's an unlicensed cable

Does medium have some extra criteria I'm not aware of?

Saves em money on buying good beans too!

What I never understood is that company executives get to make projections as part of their earning calls which heavily influences the stock price the minute after. Doesn't this allow full price manipulation even when these insiders did follow protocol to sell their stock. (10b5-1 I think?) The CEO of a company I used to work at would consistently hold his stock after providing lower projections than market expectations. We would always end up beating those earnings projections, but the process would repeat. Once or twice a year, we would announce higher projections and the CEO would be scheduled to sell the following day with a nice price bump. Meanwhile the rest of us were in a regular blackout period following earnings.

Yeah, the thing I mentioned about "selling in patterns" is based on something I vaguely remember a while back regarding Zuckerberg. He did a big selloff right before Facebook/Meta announced some big embarrassment and people were certain he'd face insider trading, but "this fits a pattern of seasonal sales" was the excuse I saw some people throw around and I never heard anything about it again.

Personally at that level I think it'd be cheaper to hire a US Senator to do the buying/selling for you, they're immune to insider trading and they can count their cut as campaign money.

The lava comes from the lower crust/upper mantel, not the center of the earth. The inner core of the earth is extremely hot but solid iron and nickle metal, because it is under so much pressure. Then, the outer core is a liquid metal. Around that is the mantel, which is a mix of metals and minerals. The area where the crust and mantel meet is where magma comes from.

You have to understand that 'color' doesn't really exist. Light is just another part of the electromagnetic spectrum like gamma rays, x-rays, microwaves and radio waves. These are all just photons at different wavelengths or energy levels. You brain takes the signal it gets from cells that are sensitive to certain frequencies and creates the hallucination that we call vision. Purple is just what your brain tells you that certain frequency is.