author's point is that capitalist values is at odds with the core values and value proposition that these brands had at their genesis
Further, stability is not necessarily an overriding goal. A 50% shot at 100m is generally preferred over a 100k/year lifestyle business.
PS: I don’t think this is even a downside of capitalism. More people enjoy a Micdonads hamburger in a day than eat at a given 5 star restaurant in a year.
Revenue and Profit are intimately intertwined, with their cousin Cost riding shotgun.
But that's not the scenario at all. The scenario is about sales, not capital investment. The point is that its very unlikely (for retail at least) that you need to invest $X of capital in order to sell $X of merchandise. The question about returns here is not about returns on capital investment, but profit margins on sales.
So, after 1 week you have 20k in gas and 100 - 19 = 81k in cash. You need to spend 80k of that on more gas for text week resulting in a net profit of 1k or a 1% profit margin.
But, repeat that for one year and you bought 80k x 52 weeks of gas = 4.16 million even though you only had 500k in capital. Further your profit margin might be low but your ROI was 52/500 or 10.4% which is not bad.
You make the 20% with the 100k, and hopefully find similar opportunities with your other 9 stacks of 100k's.
Profit is the only driving force in the market.
The comparison is not about investing $X and making $Y profit. It's about selling $X with a given profit margin.
The actual capital requirements to sell $X are assumed to be roughly the same for both scenarios.
Massive companies also have low average profits, but it’s not low quality driving down profits so much as growing to the edge of unprofitability because high profit margins are not inherently as useful as total profits. If say Budweiser increased their price by say 10c a can their overall profit would decrease even if their profit margin would increase.
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That's not neccesarily the case. The ideal price point for maximum profits is ever-changing.
Would Budseiser's profits increase if they lowered the price by $0.10?
The answer is the same: it depends.
Yeah, that never happens with capitalism...
Trying to scapegoat a particular economic or political system as inherently corrupt is naive at best, and disingenuous or dishonest at worst.
And there's never been (and never will be) a 100% capitalist society, so even if they could be corruption free it doesn't help much.
Brainstorming a range of negative interpretations of my words then providing appropriate insults for each, isn't my idea of responding to the strongest plausible interpretation of my words. For that matter, if you can't imagine anything that isn't insult-worthy, you might simply ask me what I mean. The answer would be that I was arguing capitalism has a relatively unusual feature of actually channeling greed rather than trying to stamp it out. If "the new soviet man" makes a decision for personal profit versus that of society they are corrupting their communist system. Whereas a capitalist can do so completely within their capitalist system. It has nothing to do with name-calling or about who is and isn't "corrupt" as some inherent human or systemic flaw. Do you still not get my point?