Why wouldn't your friend just open up a practice and compete with this dysfunctional company?
Start to finish, a vet clinic buildout is going to run you $1M+, and any lender is going to want a personal guarantee that uses your home and other personal assets as collateral if they’re lending to a new business owner.
You could certainly find investors, but then you’ll have people wanting an ROI.
I could come up with more reasons, but those two are probably the main ones.
My grandfather opened and ran two veterinary clinics in the 1970s. He sold both of them in the 1980s, one of them is still around. The other one closed after the buyer, another veterinarian, killed himself after the building and land were eminent domained for a freeway expansion and he felt he wasn’t paid enough for the land by the government.
This is a trend I’ve noticed that goes along with “enshittification” wherein the normal thing (let’s take grocery stores as an example) become either so downmarket-oriented (e.g., Dollar General) or aggravating (e.g., self-checkout lanes, poor inventory management, objectionable customer service) that they abandon the middle market and become intolerable.
At that point the upper part of the market diverges, and something like personal shoppers becomes the norm for anyone who can afford it.
On one hand, people in the middle class get squeezed by salary, and on the other hand they get squeezed because they hate Dollar General and they can’t afford a butler to shop for them.
Real nice system we have here.
self-checkout lanes are not viewed as a bad thing by many. Given the option of a self checkout or staffed checked, I'd choose self checkout. The negative aspect of self-checkout is that it's usually paired with the store being understaffed, instead of redirecting the freed up staff to other roles.
yet another job where i can, in fact, actually do it better myself. i'm just as fast on the self checkout machines as the cashiers are on their point of sale systems. the buffered queue also helps tremendously, instead of the line lottery of checkout lines. again - simulated and optimized.
the other people that do self checkout are also basically young-ish, single/alone, and would rather be anywhere than the fucking grocery store checkout line. separating people who are interested in getting the fuck out of there with food from the people who are slow, clumsy, and deliberately take a long time to make sure all their tiny little nitpicks are addressed by a captive employee audience is the best thing to happen to groceries in the 30+ years i've been wasting my life 15 minutes at a time at stores.
I think the point here is that if you're the sort of person who does a weekly shop for a family, you can't possibly fit all of your bags on the scale, even at the largest self-checkout kiosks.
FWIW, I think your self-checkout experience is probably uncommon. I find that the barcode scanners at self-checkout machines are often poorly-calibrated, dirty, or just generally a pain in the ass. I say this as someone who spent five years doing tech support on point-of-sale equipment, where my job was quite literally to help people use their finicky barcode scanners.
https://ninanco.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/4a-blurred-11...
BUT
Worth mentioning that this unit is twice as long overall than the units where I shop, which are set up two deep. I think with a scale this large, you’re halving the number of lanes you can support.
In other words - this is a solved problem.
And who abandons the middle part of the market? The providers? The customers?
Not really making sense here but I get it if you’re just venting or whatever.
If this doesn't make sense, maybe it's a metaphor. Does it seem like the normal way of doing things from 20 years ago has now been replaced with an absolute garbage version, and a version you can't afford?
In tech, Apple comfortably occupies the premium end of the market, and other companies tried to move in (think Microsoft with the Surface) but with fairly limited success. With cars, the move has been to bigger, more luxurious vehicles, but you still have lower end models at various levels of trim. I have noticed it with, say, dentists, where sole traders and small businesses have essentially been replaced by franchises. Same for chemists.
To me the driving factor is that not everyone can compete on price, and competing for the luxury segment of the market is a fairly obvious alternative strategy. It also goes hand-in-hand with other factors like sustainability, where it might be impossible to make your product cheaply because you source local or recycled materials, or you make a product that is designed to last longer, so your customers don't return to buy your product as frequently.
I'd say the last 7-8 years I've noticed a move to luxury products in most markets just as a general trend. I call it the affordable luxury phenomenon. But I think a lot of it has been driven by cheap credit, and luxury goods makers reaching down into the middle market (the aspirational market) as much as the middle market being abandoned.
Do you not just have some store like Tom Thumb, Randall’s, Albertsons, Krogers, Sprouts, or H‑E‑B near you? I know there are places that don’t have good access to regular grocery stores, wondering if that’s the case for you or for some reason you see these as either too junky or too high end?
For sure there are more self checkout lanes, but it’s usually not too hard to find a regular staffed lane if that’s what you want.
And anyway, even the doctors of veterinary work aren't rolling in money. Private practices sell to investors because they have the mountains of cash that the sole proprietor does not. Its just the devils bargain people strike all the time.
Most professions have a gulf between the wealth of business owners and workers. You can’t start a business working hand to mouth.
https://www.amazon.com/How-start-business-statistical-bankru...