I love the quote from John Collison:
"This is digital migration in a very compressed period of time, for both businesses and customers," Collison adds. "My mom recently asked me if I'd heard of 'this Instacart thing.' Yeah mom, I have."
"This is digital migration in a very compressed period of time, for both businesses and customers," Collison adds. "My mom recently asked me if I'd heard of 'this Instacart thing.' Yeah mom, I have."
Stripe is one of the “good” tech companies in this respect by helping to level the playing field for smaller businesses, but it’s not going to be enough.
That said, it's less clear to me that the medium-term impact will be pro-incumbent or pro-large company. Big incumbents tend to be less adaptable and to benefit from large fixed cost barriers to entry (e.g. real estate). We're seeing a lot of nimble small businesses migrate to online business models far faster than the behemoths they used to struggle to compete against.
There's no benefit to having a small business that provides inferior products or inferior service relative to a large company.
I buy from small companies all the time and many of those that I do will likely survive because they provide better goods and services than any large company.
Doing away with large companies doesn't guarantee that this will end, though.
An example: while there are few large corporations providing physician services, the American Medical Association lobbies on behalf of the thousands of individual doctors and small private practices, often to the detriment of consumers anyway.
Sure there is - in terms of where the profit goes. The profit in a small business goes to the owner(s), who usually live somewhere in the local community, and in turn that money stays within the community to be spent on other businesses there.
When a Walmart comes along, the profits all move up the chain to a corporation that is nowhere nearby, effectively sucking the wealth out of small towns in exchange for slightly reduced costs thanks to efficient logistics.
The happy medium would be to find a way to have logistics as good as Walmart without having to actually be Walmart.
A business owner can have a successful business but they aren't really making tremendous profit, so how much of that money really remains in the local community.
The other aspect is also that real estate taxes need to be increased, which is the best way to ensure that funds inside a community stay there.
This way as more work moves remotely, through real estate taxes the local communities are still able to thrive.
I'm not disagreeing with what you are saying, but it isn't so black and white.
Where have you been for the past decade? The economic impact is increasingly concentrated levels of wealth, where a handful of people are vacuuming up pretty much all of the wealth in America. The middle class (local business owners) is shrinking, the labour/wage worker class is growing, and the ultra-wealthy are getting richer.
> The other aspect is also that real estate taxes need to be increased
No, this also affects local businesses, who do not have the profit margins needed to survive. You need to find a way to limit the power big corporations have, while not hurting small/local business owners. A VAT tax is likely a much better solution to this problem.
Increasing real estate taxes is one way to ensure only big corporations with extensive logistics networks and high profit margins, that pay their laborers minimum wage would be able to survive. The point is to prioritize people over corporations, and your solution misses that completely.
And yet, the covid crisis demonstrates the opposite effect.
The cost advantage from Walmart is not just in logistics, it is specialization of labor, superior negotiating power against suppliers, and diversification of geographic risk. A small business will be less efficient and give up more profits to suppliers.
Additionally, because they fly under the radar and are less efficient, small businesses can be some of the most exploitative workplaces. Small businesses are also often exempted from pro-worker regulations, for example they do not have to provide healthcare to their employees. Several small businesses in cities I've lived in have waged years-long union-busting campaigns.
The point isn't that small businesses are worse than large ones, I just think they have a progressive halo which is often undeserved.
I guess you could say I’m privileged to be able to value more diverse offerings over the absolute lowest prices, but culture suffers when all you have are same 5 retailers and 20 restaurant chains in every town.
Also, economies of scale put small businesses at a disadvantage, even if their product isn’t inferior.
That could be restaurants that provide better quality food than the large chain restaurants. It could be a butchers that provide higher quality locally sourced meats than what I can get at Safeway and Walmart. It could be businesses making specialized gear that I use in my outdoor endeavors (Hyperlite Mountain Gear, Mountain Laurel Designs, Astral, Kokatat, Alpacka Raft, etc. etc.). It can be businesses that sell things the big businesses don't such as a specialty wine shop. There are tons of good small businesses that provide superior value. Selling the same products as Amazon and Walmart at a higher price with poorer customer service and worse return policy doesn't provide superior value.
A good business is one that provides superior value. Being large or small tells me nothing about the value being provided.
Everyone focusing on things like pricing power is missing the forest for the trees. If you don't have pricing power, the money is still leaving the community. Instead of going to the middleman that lives far away, it just goes to the manufacturers that live far away.
Furthermore, many of these large companies are public, which means everyone within any community has the opportunity of buying a piece of the company on the open market. The communities that buy the most of such large companies probably even keep more wealth in their community than the ones that don't. If enough local people buy shares, then it's possible that more profits flow into that particular community than flow out of that community.
With a small local retailer, it just means the money flows into the pocket of one person or one family in the community and no one else in the community can buy into that business and get the benefits of the value generated. This is what happens in places like Lake Chelan in Washington, where one family (the Campbells) has a stranglehold on politics and funnels everything to their businesses, which no one else locally is able to buy into.
Strong communities with a solid local economy are those that have many such small businesses that provide superior value. If your community does nothing that an Amazon or Walmart does, then there really isn't anything that's going to flow the balance of payments in your direction and the community will slowly die.
> Rather than mass production we need production of the masses.
Something like that.
Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Is_Beautiful
> First published in 1973, Small Is Beautiful brought Schumacher's critiques of Western economics to a wider audience during the 1973 energy crisis and the popularisation of the concept of globalization. In 1995 The Times Literary Supplement ranked Small Is Beautiful among the 100 most influential books published since World War II.
Overall I agree with your point. Many have shut their doors and I don't know if they'll reopen.
Certainly there will be some stickiness, but how much and for whom?
To state the obvious, some adoption will be permanent but others not much. Where that will happen and by how much is a diff question.
Example, will people go back to Starbucks or will they keep on making more coffee at home, maybe get an entry espresso machine?
Even Mao with his Hong weibings wasn’t able to stamp out the parts of Chinese culture he wanted to stamp out forever.
Right now a lot of people have no choice but to learn how to meet with Zoom, how to order with Instacart, how to communicate through Slack, ... And as they do, hopefully things are working out OK and they're building confidence in those technologies.
When the pandemic subsides, I don't see much reason for people to revert en masse.
Now we are trying to minimize going out at all. So we've been using instacart and shipt for over a month and it's a big time saver. So I expect we will continue to use them once we are in a more normal state.
So I expect lots of people will keep using them just because it saves time.
I think normal is going to be way out like 18 months at least and probably longer.
Even at that point we're probably going to be minimizing crowds and shopping in stores. And we're definitely going to be shopping less frequently and larger grocery orders.
This event will change how a large % of us lives and shops for a long time.
- Staying secure, reliable, and available for our existing customers. Some businesses in Stripe are seeing huge surges in demand and others are seeing major shortfalls. In either case, we want to make sure we can that we can be relied on to provide flawless service.
- Keeping up with the surge of new customers. A lot of businesses are migrating online and many of the platforms we serve are also seeing significant spikes in signups. So, we're investing a lot of effort in making sure that we can scale effectively there and remove all unnecessary friction. (There's a very active project working on cleaning up our docs and improving the integration experience, for example.)
- Adding support for business models that were previously limited because of bank/card network restrictions. We just launched support for telemedicine last week.
- Figuring out ways to help businesses by enabling access to government programs (e.g. the PPP program in the US). These programs usually haven't thought much about the somewhat unique characteristics of online businesses. We're trying to help government officials understand what internet businesses need. (And, per the comment elsewhere in this thread, we're rolling out our first PPP loans this week.)
Anecdotally, I couldn't get an interview, even though I had an offer from them in the past.
You can see our open roles at https://stripe.com/jobs/search?t=engineering (some corresponding to multiple people). They’re very real. We hire hundreds of engineers every year.
Do you want to clarify your phrasing or is that actually how you operate? :(