Comment by rocket_surgeron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rocket_surgeron | Hacker News Reader

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rocket_surgeron

>In a REAL capitalistic economy, a small shipping provider would have raised the capital immediately to capitalize on the strikes, advertised their services to UPSs customers and eaten the company away.

In the real world it takes weeks if not months to purchase a delivery vehicle. There are no delivery van lots that you go to in order to browse a wide variety of Morgan Olson and Utilimaster vans and then plop down a million dollars for 20 of them, not that 20 of them would allow you to run a parcel shipping service. You need thousands. Which means a production run at a manufacturer who is already booked through next year.

Hell, it would take weeks just to figure out WHERE to advertise much less actually inking deals, unless you like throwing money away.

It doesn't matter if you apparate a trillion dollars, time is immovable. It took a decade of conceptualizing and two years of actualizing to start FedEx.

If a rationally-acting rational actor rationalizes ten quadrillion dollars of gold into his pocket, it doesn't matter one fucking bit.

They can't buy the facilities, systems, equipment, and experience needed to do shit. They can't use their iron capitalist will to pour concrete faster.

This is one, of many, fundamental blind spot concerning reality that capitalists or pseudo-capitalists used to working in the fake online venture capitalist world have.

> In the real world it takes weeks if not months to purchase a delivery vehicle.

But you are looking at it from the perspective of someone sitting behind a keyboard, starting from scratch.

In the real world with thriving economies, there will be smaller, underdog players already operating. Maybe they are regional, or maybe they have a slower/smaller fleet.

Whatever the reason, these smaller players rise up to eat the big one because they already have something to leverage. Facilities, workers etc. They just need to raise capital to expand rapidly.

The steps in the parent post are not meant for someone starting from scratch.

>In the real world with thriving economies, there will be smaller, underdog players already operating. Maybe they are regional, or maybe they have a slower/smaller fleet.

Yes. I use them every day. I send million of dollars of aerospace equipment to and fro every year using 3PL, none of which are UPS or FedEx or the USPS.

There are thousands of 3PL firms, each competing with each other.

If you search "full truck" and/or "intermodal" and "logistics" I guarangoddamntee there are a dozen within 50 miles of your zip code.

> They just need to raise capital to expand rapidly.

LOL

If my preferred smaller logistics firm (Polaris) was given eleventy-billion hexaseptillion dollars it would take two years at a minimum just to lease the aircraft, airport slots, and facilities needed to compete with a single-digit percentage of UPS's network.

Again, the fact that people think that smaller underdog competitors to UPS don't exist is a glaring, supermassive-black-hole-sized blind spot that pseudo-capitalists have.

Once again, your understanding of this is based on single anecdotal experiences.

In a thriving economy, there will be multiple underdogs, all competing for different segments of the market. Each one of them will eat market share - which will lead to UPS losing some customers at first. Then, if they can keep nibbling at the market share until they keep acquiring more customers.

There are regional parcel carriers. Two of the largest just merged (OnTrac and LaserShip).

Neither of them, nor the combined, has the assets (physical vehicles/aircraft, drivers, pilots, package handlers, terminals/hubs) to take over a substantial fraction of UPS volume on a few days’ notice. And they won’t scale up ahead of obvious opportunity because if UPS settles, they’ve got a ton of previous capital stranded and employees to fire with no associated business to pay for them.

The original post bemoaned the fact that the economy has become too concentrated to a handful of companies and is too protective of large corporations.

I took this to mean that capitalism would better work as intended if UPS was not allowed to grow to be as big as they are. They would then be a regional player themselves, one of many, and it would be easier for one or more other similarly sized companies to take over their business if they drop the ball. There would be a real competitive market.

The scenario you mentioned is the current state of affairs, where such a large company cannot be replaced, and can hold the economy hostage.

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