Articles like these make me appreciate my business degree, because this list is the basics of any business. 30% COGS, high shipping costs, outsourced manufacturing, big box focusing on low end market, etc is all very normal for almost any industry.
More generally, sure, you never “need” an X degree to understand X, but most people won’t have spent the time learning X on their own unless they have an X degree.
ERP administrators are an untapped source of business knowledge, because they map all the crap business is up to and are forced to learn about all the weird metrics, acronyms, reports, and so forth a business uses to survive.
A COGS of 30% is, as they say, on the upper end. For brands that have to offer a certain amount of quality in order to sell instead of going purely for ads and brand recognition.
50% is the retail store margin. I thought it was 40%, but that's probably a global rate, with electronics being higher.
And how often it is returned to the store because buyer didn't like it. Some things can be resold, but most of the time the seller eats up the costs. It is always amusing for me to see people being outraged by the costs and seeing nothing wrong with returning something to the store just because they can.
Retailers make more money on cables and mounting brackets than a TV, for example.
I don't remember the exact price, but it does indeed mean that the margin must have been less than 16 %.
Generally yes.
can the distributor force them to keep prices up not to upset the other resellers?
Retailers upsetting other retailers is called channel conflict and is often solved with minimum advertised price policies. High-end companies like Apple and Sony often have this policy which is why you see the same price everywhere.
After a decade working post graduation and nowadays being comfortable negotiating and managing millions-dollar projects, I still find the book covering all the fundamentals you need to know about modern business.
22 year olds know this stuff when they leave school, right?
It’s not rocket science.