I hear stuff like this all the time. It feels odd, given that pulp fiction dimeback "novels" exist for over a century. Some of these series run into several thousand issues, with authors expected to write a new novel each week.
The "mediocre but quickly producible content" has existed for ever, and it hasn't drowned out the "serious" novel market. Why should it now?
That’s true in the absence of subsidies and I’d wager that the relative or differential effect of subsidies is minor in terms of explaining why $1 croissants sell well at Costco.
By what and how? Don't left us hanging like this.
I'm not sure how old you are but when I was growing up in America in the 70's, eating out meant either high-end/pricey restaurants or MacDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut, or Taco Bell. Now you can get Thai, Sushi, Indian, Sichuan, and more.
I grew up in US flyover country and I remember the 70s and that's not the case.
There were diners. There were mom- and pop-owned holes in the wall. There were more respectable "family restaurants" that didn't serve what was called "ethnic food" at the time but were certainly not fast food and were also reasonably priced. I remember my 15k-ish population town's one Italian restaurant and its one Chinese restaurant and the short-lived Greek place, none of them chains but all highly Americanized. Half an hour away in a nearby small city there were many more options.
> Now you can get Thai, Sushi, Indian, Sichuan, and more.
Those are all things we can find in the present-day equivalent of a 70s food court. They're part of the new fast food - mostly garbage.
Nobody is paying Costco a 'subsidy' to produce cheap croissants.
The big box stores incentivize the supply chain to do things faster/cheaper. Cheaper ingredients, shorter baking times (hence maybe some other additives needed), etc...
So, cheaper butter, oil additives, cheaper flour, additives to streamline short cooking times, easy movement, texture for packaging, etc..
It all adds ups to "it's ok, but meh".
I think it is incorrect/misleading to suggest that they benefit substantially from subsidies that are not available to the $8 croissant maker. (Costco benefits more from highway subsidies, for example, but not by enough to move the needle between $8 and $1…)
I'm 'assuming', that if it is something like 1 cent, or 5 cents. Then it is a larger impact on the 1$ Costco Croissant), versus the 8$ bespoke croissant.
Then we'd also have to look at quantity sold.
Crouasant Sold Price Per Unit Total Revenue Cost Of Goods per unit Subsidy Total Cost of Good Total Subsidy Profit Subsidy / Profit Costco 100000 1 100000 0.2 0.1 10000 10000 90000 0.111111111 Bespoke 100 8 800 0.5 0.1 40 10 760 0.013157895
So, it is true, Costco makes a larger percentage of profit from subsidies than the bespoke.
11% versus 1.3%.
The Quantity is much bigger factor.
So guess, on balance, Costco is more subsidized than the small baker. Man, we should include labor too. Basically small bakers are at huge disadvantage.
Edit
My spreadsheet didn't look good here. Is there a way to format HN to show a table?
We already have a market for books, we can observe the market for books, why do we need a food analogy?
Novels seem like they should have the same dynamic. It's effectively free to write novels. You only pay with time and stress and don't need money. But without a publisher to market you, the hope that anyone will ever read what you write gets dimmer and dimmer.
In the same vein, I feel like serial cartoons are holding out much better right now than filmed television. They're still in a golden era, probably because they're so much cheaper to produce that they can survive not being popular without getting canceled.
The new tools have dialed the trash volume to 11. It is now possible to have infinite trash. Thus the value goes to zero.
OTOH, Rowling has sold close to a billion novels.
Because the tech community only has ideas that involve solving problems with tech. Provenance is (relatively) easy to address with tech. Measuring quality might require human input, so that's right out.
There are a million novels now, of which 90% is self-published for a reason (no one wants to publish it, because it won't make any money). With a text generator, there are now 10min lion novels, of which 99% won't make any money.
The book market has found methods to deal with the "99% is garbage" problem. This isn't new.
One, AI creates a a 99.999% garbage situation. Which as anyone who deals with SLAs can tell you is a world apart from 99%.
Two, Clarkesworld has announced quite clearly that the scale AI creates is not solvable using the old methods.